


text

by trulyfine (ssstrychnine)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Anxiety, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Texting, alternate universe - pokemon go has been released in korea.......
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-08-14 12:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 46,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8014624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/trulyfine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>baekhyun is studying himself into an early grave<br/>chanyeol is giving baekhyun's number out to the people he pisses off<br/>kyungsoo just wants a bedroom with a door</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [сообщение / text](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10640538) by [annstis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annstis/pseuds/annstis)



**(10:07) Where are you?**

**(10:07) If you’re not here in ten minutes I’m calling campus security and reporting you**

**(10:11)** **I’m serious**

**(10:16)** **Next time I see you, you’re dead**

**(10:18)** **This is Kyungsoo..**

(11:02) hey i think you have the wrong number

 **(11:02)** **I definitely don’t**

(11:03 who do you think you’re texting?

**(11:03)** **Funny, Chanyeol**

Baekhyun groans. He’s in bed still, tangled up in his sheets, holding his phone above his face and squinting at it through the low-light. He drops it onto his chest and groans again when it hurts a little more than he expects it to, the corner thudding hollowly against his breastbone. Of course Chanyeol has made an enemy three weeks into the new semester. Of course Chanyeol gave this enemy Baekhyun’s phone number. Of course, of course, of course. He sighs, gets up, heads to the living room, scuffing his socks along the carpet. He leaves his phone on the bed. He doesn’t have time for murder threats. 

Chanyeol is in the kitchen, leaning against the bench, spearing pieces of pineapple on a metal chopstick so he doesn’t get sticky fingers. He’s all limbs and hair and ears in the morning. He always manages to look messy somehow, even when he’s hardly moving, even with his shirt tucked in and buttoned to the wrists and a piece of pineapple held aloft on a chopstick. When it slips free and slides down the length of the chopstick to his hand, he just laughs and licks his fingers and tosses the chopstick into the sink.  
  
“Who’s Kyungsoo and why is he sending me threatening texts meant for you?” Baekhyun asks him, stealing a piece of pineapple from the bowl. It’s cold from the fridge and it makes his teeth ache but he likes the way it stings his lips a little.  
  
“Wow, he really texted you?” Chanyeol asks, looking surprised and a little bit guilty but mostly delighted. “I thought he was bluffing.”  
  
“What did you do to him? Is he a spurned lover?”

“No, nothing like that. I broke his door.” 

“You _what_ ?”  
  
“There was a party at his apartment, he lives with Jongin but I don’t think it was his party, I don’t know. I wound up there and got too drunk and fell through his bedroom door, ripped it off its hinges.”  
  
“And you gave him my number.”  
  
“I told him I’d meet him today at the library to discuss fixing it. I’m going to pay for it but I can’t until payday and he’s kind of... I didn’t think he’d take that well. I wanted to buy some time and I only know yours and Jongdae’s numbers off by heart and... well, Jongdae’s more likely to give me sex so... I really didn’t think he’d text you.”

Baekhyun takes another piece of pineapple. Of course Chanyeol broke a stranger's door. Of course Chanyeol got too drunk and destroyed an important part of someone else's home. Of course, of course, of course. He didn’t think it was possible to break through a door with body weight alone, but if anyone can do it, it’s Chanyeol. He has more limbs than he knows what to do with. Baekhyun takes more pineapple. He chews on his lower lip, making the acidic fruit sting worse. Chanyeol is looking down at him with puppy eyes and a puppy smile and he touches Baekhyun’s arm with puppy paws.

“Tell him I’ll have it in a week.”

“I’m not telling him anything.”  
  
“Tell him I’ll get him a solid gold door in one week.”  
  
“ _No_ ,” Baekhyun draws the word out dramatically, like it’s the only word he knows. Sometimes it feels like it is. “No way. Why are you like this?”  
  
“Please? Baekhyunnie, _please_.”  
  
“Oh my god,” he shakes Chanyeol’s hand off his arm. “You’re cooking until his door is fixed.”  
  
“Deal. I love you.”  
  
“Whatever, you’re an idiot.” Chanyeol beams and Baekhyun can’t help smiling too. He’s infectious. His existence alone gives Baekhyun a fever.

Baekhyun steals the bowl of pineapple and takes it back to his room. He has class in less than an hour now but they live in one of the student apartment buildings, on the edges of campus, so he can take his time getting ready. It’s probably the only thing he ever takes his time with. He has six new text messages and he leaves them unopened. He eats pineapple. He puts on music, something bright and bubblegum, and he shuffles around his room doing half-hearted, sock-soft dance moves, half his own, half misremembered music video choreography. He gets dressed. He fusses with his hair. He wonders why Chanyeol didn’t invite him to the party. Maybe if he’d been there there would have been less property damage. Probably not. Really he knows exactly why Chanyeol didn’t invite him to the party, but he doesn’t dwell on that. He wouldn’t have gone anyway.

Just before he leaves for class he reads his messages.  
  
**(11:04) Where are you now?**

**(11:04) Chanyeol**

**(11:05) You need to fix my door before the property manager visits**

**(11:15) Chanyeol**

**(11:15) Chanyeol**

**(11:15)** **Asshole**

Baekhyun laughs, tugs on his shoes, ties the laces, adds the number to his contacts as ‘Chanyeol’s nemesis’. He hasn’t really texted anyone other than Chanyeol and Jongdae, Chanyeol’s sort of friend sort of boyfriend, and Baekbeom in a long time and it’s nice, just seeing a new conversation in his inbox, even if it is with a stranger. Even if it’s not likely to last very long. He thinks of how to reply as he walks to class. It’s better to be honest, he decides, it’s not like he broke the door.

(11:54) chanyeol’s my roommate and he gave you my number instead of his sorry!! he told me to tell you he’d give you money for your door in a week  

**(11:56)** **Just give me his number**

(11:56) no way

 **(11:57)** **He gave me yours**

(11:59) i’m a better person than he is. gotta go to class, sorry again!!

Baekhyun is trying hard this year and he turns his phone off when he’s in class. His first year had been impossible and he’d made it even harder by skipping almost everything. Chanyeol and Jongdae had pulled him back into something resembling consciousness near the end of the year and he’d only scraped through because of them. He puts his phone in his pocket, takes a seat near the back of the lecture theatre, pulls a notebook out of his backpack. It’s purple and when the sun hits it right it sparkles. Jongdae had given it to him on his birthday as a joke, back when he was trying his hardest to survive on alcohol fumes and night air, and he’s determined to fill it with at least one semester’s study notes.

He’s studying social welfare and he loves it, really he does, but he still finds it hard to focus sometimes. Hard to figure out what’s important when he’s taking in so much every day. He wants to be helping people already instead of reading books and writing reports. He wants to be out in the field, talking to scared kids, tearaway kids, straightening out their crooked paths. Every semester he feels like he’s failed someone just by writing instead of talking, but it’ll be years until he’s qualified enough to do any real good. So he takes notes in his sparkly notepad and he marks important pages of his textbooks with neon pink post-it notes and he sets up alarms on his phone to tell him when his assignments are close to due. It’ll be worth it, he thinks, in the end, if he can keep himself from imploding before then.

He doesn’t turn his phone on until he’s done with classes for the day, late in the afternoon. He grins at the little red ‘four’ hovering above the speech bubble messages icon.

“So popular today,” he murmurs, swiping a finger across the screen.

**(12:01) Being a better person than Park Chanyeol isn’t hard**

**(12:01) Tell him a week is too long to have no door**

**(12:02) Tell him I’m going to break his fingers when I see him**

**(12:02) Thank you**

Baekhyun laughs. He wants to send back a thousand emoji, flowers and sparkling hearts and the victory sign. He doesn’t think Chanyeol’s nemesis, _Kyungsoo_ , will appreciate it, but he wants to do it all the same. It’s something to do with him sending four messages in two minutes. Something to do with him saying _thank you_ after threatening physical violence.

(17:07) ill pass on the message

(17:07) not the violence tho

**(17:09) No, I want to do the violence myself**

(17:09) you’re welcome then

**(17:10) But please treat him badly**

(17:10) i always do

Chanyeol makes kimchi fried rice for dinner and Baekhyun assumes that he will make kimchi fried rice for the rest of the week too, because Chanyeol only knows three recipes, but he doesn’t complain. He makes them well and Baekhyun lives on ramyun and sugar most of the time, when he has no money to order in. He adds vegetables and eggs to his ramyun if he’s feeling adventurous or close to some sort of vitamin deficiency and Chanyeol forces him to sit at the dinner table once a week, for a proper meal, meat and side dishes and everything. It’s probably the only thing that keeps his bones from splintering or his heart from breaking. He doesn’t really have time to cook.

“You know you can do both,” Chanyeol tells him, dishing out food. “You can be good at school and healthy at the same time.”  
  
“I am healthy,” says Baekhyun, cheerfully. They’ve had this conversation before. “I eat fruit.”  
  
“You eat fruit flavoured candy and _my_ pineapple,” says Chanyeol. “You’re a mess.”  
  
“Is Kyungsoo your friend?” Baekhyun asks, because if he doesn’t change the subject they’ll get onto worse things. Chanyeol wrinkles his nose, rolls his eyes, lets it happen.  
  
“Not really, I never see him when I visit Jongin. He’s doing engineering or something, he’s always studying. Sort of like you except I think he likes it.”  
  
“ _I_ like it,” Baekhyun protests, biting down savagely on his spoon. “I just don’t like the part of it with writing... and words... and the exams.”  
  
“Right, you like the other stuff,” Chanyeol laughs.

“I’d get good grades if I could talk instead of write.” 

“Probably,” Chanyeol admits. “If anyone could shit talk their way to a degree, it would be you. Or me, actually. Anyway, Kyungsoo is scary, he’d hate you.”

“No one hates me,” Baekhyun sniffs. “I’m an angel.”

“You’re a mess,” Chanyeol repeats, reaching across to tug on the uneven strings of Baekhyun’s hoodie. “Wanna watch a movie?”  
  
“I can’t, I have to study.”  
  
“No you don’t.”  
  
“I _do_ ,” he insists. “I have an essay due soon.”  
  
“It’s the third week of term. Wanna play games?”  
  
“No.”

“Wanna stare at the wall with me?”

“Chanyeol.”

“You never do anything anymore,” Chanyeol pouts. “This isn’t the right way to study, you can have a few hours off.”

“I choose to spend my spare time sleeping,” Baekhyun says, trying to sound serene and calm and certain. His voice comes out scratchy instead and Chanyeol’s frown deepens. “Thank you for dinner, I’ll do the dishes a little later.”

In his room Baekhyun stares at his textbooks, spread around him on his bed. Books on social welfare policy and social welfare history and social welfare philosophy. He turns pages, he makes notes, he tries to keep his mind from slipping. He gets up and paces the room and recites his notes out loud. It makes them seem more real, less abstract and confusing. He really is better at talking than writing. Chanyeol refuses to study with him because he’s so loud about it and because he can’t keep still and Chanyeol is a music composition major. He says that Baekhyun’s noise is unorganised, which is very different to whatever song he’s stuck in the middle of, whatever note he has to play fifty times until it sounds right. Baekhyun thinks he’s full of shit.

There are post-it notes in every colour stuck to most surfaces in his room and on some of the walls because he carries a pad when he paces and he scribbles notes on them and sticks them to whatever is closest. He plays music from games he used to play when he studies, because sometimes the scores are clear and sparse and careful, just like he thinks he ought to be. He likes pop music better but it scatters his thoughts like light through glass. It’s not easy for him to focus on one thing at a time so he makes sure there is only one thing to focus on. His books and his sparkly notebook and his music. He used to have posters on his walls as well as post-its, girl groups and actors he likes and photos with friends, but he took them all down because it was too easy to stare at the corners of Kim Taeyeon’s mouth for three hours instead of at his textbooks.

Chanyeol had been enthusiastic at the beginning, during Baekhyun’s first year when he’d first asked him for help, but he’s wary of it now. Baekhyun doesn’t know how to explain that he’s always a second away from dropping out or running away, that he can already feel his attention splitting, only a few months into his renewed efforts at studying. It’s not Chanyeol’s problem. He has his own studies to worry about and so does Jongdae and Baekbeom is half a country away and everyone else is gone. Baekhyun taps at the screen of his phone, dragging his fingernails around the edge, the space between the case and the phone. He wonders what Kyungsoo is doing, faceless in a room without a door. He turns his phone on, opens their short message history, all threats and apologies. If Chanyeol is right about him he’s probably studying too. Baekhyun turns up the volume of his laptop, spilling out something eerie from a game he can’t remember. He walks from one side of his room to the other, five and a bit steps.

“Philosophy in the social welfare policy and services curriculum,” he hums, dragging the words out so much they don’t sound like words at all. “Byun Baekhyun: philosopher in the social welfare policy and services professions.” He sits back down at the head of his bed. He picks up his phone again and then puts it down and then shuts his notebook. The purple sparkles throw up shadows on his white walls.

(22:47) can you sleep without your door?

He sends the message before he can stop himself and then he stares at it for a long time, feeling a little bit like he’s on the edge of a cliff and the water below is deep and terrible. He doesn’t have time for texting. He flicks the phone with his fingernail and flinches when a new message flashes across the screen.

**(22:48) Only when the devil’s roommate isn’t texting me**

(22:48) sorry! goodnight!

 **(22:49)** **It’s fine, I’m not really sleeping**

(22:49) because of the door?

**(22:49) Because I have assignments due soon**

(22:50) me too ㅠ.ㅠ but how can you study without your door?

**(22:50) I have good headphones and a quiet roommate**

**(22:51) Don’t tell Chanyeol that**

(22:51) your secret’s safe with me. study well! sleep well! ^o^

**(22:51) Thank you, you too**

Baekhyun throws his phone on the floor and then throws himself off his bed to pick it up again. He puts it on his bedside table, face down. It really has been so long since he's spoken to someone new. He’s good at making friends in person, he does it almost compulsively, but everyone he met first year disappeared when he stopped going out. It’s not their fault, technically it was him who disappeared, and he knows he’s become something different than what he was then. He thinks he was someone else with them as well, but he doesn’t know who. Talking to someone new, someone he knows nothing about who knows nothing about him, someone he’s never seen or heard or touched, it feels safe. Like texting a stranger might not be so distracting that it ruins his life. Like he could tell Kyungsoo everything about himself and that would be okay too.

He tries to get back into studying again but his textbooks seem suddenly unimportant. It’s late and he’s made progress on an essay that isn’t due for a couple of weeks. He has bullet points and stickied quotes and a list of resources to investigate further. There are five new post-it’s on his wall, above his bed. He moves the books to his desk, stacking them haphazardly, and then he goes to the bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth. It’s an early night for him, but not that early. He turns his music off and puts his laptop away. He climbs into bed and shuts his eyes. He feels like he has room to breathe, space around him, clear and bright, that he can fill up with whatever he wants. He stretches out his limbs until his bones creak with the effort and he switches off his bedside lamp and he falls asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Baekhyun wakes up slowly. He has the leftovers of dreams behind his eyes and he thinks he must have been dreaming of sunshine because everything feels warm and bright. He opens his eyes and squints across the room at the gap in the curtains, letting in the light that found its way into his dreams. It feels wrong, to be waking up to sun this bright, and he sits up properly and grabs his phone from his bedside table. The time wakes him up fully. It’s quarter past ten and it’s Tuesday which means his first class is a quarter finished already.

He dresses in whatever is on the floor already; odd socks and sweatpants and one of the ratty t-shirts he usually wears around the apartment, the neckline stretched out because he pulls at it so often. He crashes out of his room, ignores Chanyeol who is sitting at the dining table, staring at him with an open mouth. In the bathroom he splashes cold water on his face and brushes his teeth and scowls at himself in the mirror. This isn’t something he _does_. Or at least it isn’t something he’s done in months. He didn’t even sleep through his alarm, he forgot to set it entirely. He doesn’t have time for this. He spits into the sink, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, charges back to the kitchen.

“Breakfast?” Chanyeol asks, nodding at the stove where something that smells spicy is bubbling. There is rice and kimchi at the table.

“No,” says Baekhyun, shaking his head as he passes. “I didn’t set my alarm, I can’t... I’m gonna get something after.”

“No you won’t,” Chanyeol says, tapping his spoon against the side of his bowl. “You’ll forget and then you’ll probably die, Baek.”

“I’ll be fine,” he says, picking up his bag from where he left it in the living room, struggling with his shoes. He feels like he’s already doomed, there’s no way he will be able to recover from this. An unset alarm has spelled out his fate as an unqualified, wannabe social worker who will never help anyone. His chest feels tight and hot and his throat aches. He can feel Chanyeol’s eyes on him and that only makes it worse.

“You’ll definitely die,” sighs Chanyeol. “I can’t pay for your funeral, I have to buy a door. You know your brain works better if you eat right? Better food means better grades. I saw a documentary once where they compared students who lived on ramyun and students who lived on like... meat and vegetables, and there was-”

“ _Chanyeol, shut up_ ,” Baekhyun snaps, the sharpness of his voice surprising even him. Chanyeol blinks. Baekhyun looks away, ties his shoelaces, ignores the sound of Chanyeol sighing, pushing out his chair, the sound of him tidying his dishes, the sound of him leaving the room. He really shouldn’t be surprised when people tell him to be quiet, Baekhyun thinks, but even just the thought tastes bitter.

He leaves the apartment at ten thirty and he runs even though he doesn’t have to. There’s no point going to class now, he’ll just spend the whole time trying to catch up. He runs because he knows he’ll feel even worse if he doesn’t. Running is like a punishment and he thinks that maybe if he punishes himself enough then he won’t fail. He runs so fast his calves ache and his throat burns and his eyes tear up and he hits the campus in three minutes instead of ten. He runs so fast he doesn’t see the person in front of him, leaving the library, until they’ve collided. The guy falls backwards, palms slamming into the concrete, his armful of books crashing to the ground around him. Baekhyun is able to keep his balance but for a split second he thinks he must have been struck by lightning, because it’s that sort of day, because he deserves it. When he realises that he’s possibly just killed some other student, he isn’t exactly relieved.

“I’m sorry,” he squeaks. “I’m really... I’m really, really sorry, I wasn’t looking.”  

“Obviously,” mutters the other guy. He’s sitting on the ground still, staring at his palms which are scraped raw and bleeding and studded with tiny pieces of gravel. Baekhyun crouches down next to him. He hopes he isn’t a concert pianist or an artist or a hand model.

“Let me help,” he says. “You shouldn’t put your hands on the ground, it’ll make it worse.” The guy looks up at him, wide dark eyes behind thick-framed glasses. _Pretty eyes_ , thinks Baekhyun, _a pretty mouth too_ , and then he scolds himself for letting his mind drift. He gestures at the guys waist and at his elbow, trying to get across that he wants to help him to his feet without saying it because he thinks that if he opens his mouth he’ll start to apologise again and won’t be able to stop. He tries to smile too but he must look deranged because the guy’s frown gets deeper and he looks back at his hands. His cheeks are flushed and his hair is falling across his forehead. There are pencil smudges at the tips of his fingers and the base of his thumb; more things that Baekhyun shouldn’t notice.

“I can manage,” he says. He draws his knees up to his chest and then rocks himself forward onto his toes, hands held out for balance, and then he stands. It seems a lot of effort to go through just to refuse help. He keeps his hands in front of him, palms up, and he looks at them like he still can’t quite believe what has happened. He brings them up to his mouth and blows softly, getting the worst of the gravel out. Baekhyun gathers up the books, brushing off the dust, smoothing out the corners of crumpled spines.

“You should carry a backpack,” he says, finally trusting himself to speak, smiling and cocking his head to one side, hoping the movement might pull the guy’s eyes back to him.

“You should slow down around corners,” he says. “I didn’t... I didn’t think I would lose the use of my hands today.” He doesn’t look at Baekhyun, just at his hands. He curls his fingers into his palms and the movement makes him hiss sharply.

“Come with me,” says Baekhyun. He balances his armful of books at the crook of his elbow, tugs on the guy’s sleeve with his free hand. He looks at Baekhyun again, at his hand on his arm; he seems a little dazed, wobbly on his feet. “To the pharmacy.”

He follows Baekhyun without a word, though he shakes his hand from his sleeve. Baekhyun is grateful, really, to be able to carry the books with both arms. They’re books on architecture and architectural engineering and technical drawing and they’re hard-covered and heavy. There are mechanical pencils in the front pocket of the guy’s shirt and Baekhyun is glad to see that they don’t seem to be broken. It seems strange, that he would keep them there, like something a student twenty years ago might do. Chanyeol uses pencils to write music, to mark out the notes on lined paper, and he keeps them behind his ears and that seems similarly old fashioned. Baekhyun always uses pens and he chews the tops of them until they’re gritty plastic pulp and he scribbles out his mistakes because he can’t erase them.

He _is_ an artist, he thinks, and guilt climbs up his throat.

In the pharmacy, Baekhyun grabs gauze and saline solution and plasters and balances them on top of the books. The artist doesn’t say anything, just follows him around, holding his hands close to his chest, palms hovering in front of his shirt like he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself but he also doesn’t want to get his shirt dirty. Baekhyun doesn’t think he would think of either of those things if he were hurt, he’d be too busy begging sympathy off Chanyeol or Jongdae or whoever else was with him, turning the hurt into something far more dramatic than it was.

“Do we need iodine?” Baekhyun asks himself, unable to accept the silence. “No, that’s too much. Maybe antiseptic cream except I think you’re actually not supposed to put that on grazes because it stops them from healing quickly. Why do I know that? It doesn’t matter, saline will be enough.” He can feel the guy (the _artist_ ), watching him, but he doesn’t say anything so Baekhyun continues to talk to himself until he decides they have everything and then he goes to the counter.

After he’s paid for everything they stand outside the pharmacy and for a moment Baekhyun is at a loss for what to do. All he can think is that they need water, to clean the guy’s hands, but he can’t think of where to find it. The heavy books are making his arms ache. His first class will be over by now and his second will be starting and the knowledge of that hisses in the back of his head like static on an old radio.

“Bathroom,” he hears, quiet beside him, and he smiles.

“Exactly,” he confirms. “Are you doing okay?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? You seem a little...” Baekhyun shrugs the books higher up in his arms so he can twist his hand like a boat rocking on water. The artist stares at him and then he stares at his hand and then at the small plastic bag of bandages, hanging from his wrist.

“You didn’t have to buy that,” he says, slowly, as if he hadn’t been in the pharmacy at all.

“Yes I did,” Baekhyun says, as brightly as he can manage. “Come on, we have to clean it first.”

They go to the nearest bathroom and under the bright white lights his hands look worse. Baekhyun puts the books down on a dry stretch of bench, turns the tap on, grabs the guy by the wrist to pull him closer. His skin is cold but soft and he pulls away quickly, apparently snapped out of his daze by the physical contact. He holds his hands under the water, eyes shut, jaw tight. It obviously hurts but he cleans the scrapes with his fingers, brisk and businesslike despite the rusty-looking water that pools in his palms.

“Ah, they aren’t so bad,” says Baekhyun, trying to sound encouraging even though he’s trembling a little because he hurt someone. But something in the light or the water must change because the wounds really don’t look that bad anymore. They’re shallow scrapes at the high points of his palms, no longer bleeding, just red and raw. The artist doesn’t say anything, but when he can’t close his hand tight enough to twist open the cap of the saline solution, Baekhyun does it for him. Then he takes the bottle and squirts it over his palms, letting the liquid fall across the cuts and into the sink. Baekhyun tugs a bunch of paper towels from the dispenser and hands them to him when his hands are clean enough. He dabs at them, one hand and then the other, quick and careful. Baekhyun would like to do it for him, to ease his guilt a little, but he’s almost certain he wouldn’t allow it. When he reaches the bandages, he pauses.

“You’ll need to...” he starts, and then he frowns, “you’ll need to hold it here, so I can wrap it.” Baekhyun does as he’s asked, holding firmly onto the start of the bandage where it lies against the edge of his palm. His forehead wrinkles a little, while he’s wrapping his hands, and he twists his lips into a pout. It’s such a cute expression that Baekhyun wants to laugh. If Chanyeol or Jongdae made that face Baekhyun would squish their cheeks to make them smile.

“The bandages are thin,” says Baekhyun, when the edges are tucked away neatly and fastened in place with tape, “they probably won’t stop you from typing or anything. I don’t think you’ll need them tomorrow, just plasters. Maybe you didn’t even need bandages at all but it’s good we got them, I think, just in case. You’re very brave, I would have cried. I’m really sorry. You have pencils uh... pencils and drawing books, I hope it doesn’t stop you from drawing. Can I... is there anything else I can do?”

“Just be quiet, for a second.”

“Oh,” Baekhyun laughs. “Well, I don’t know, I don't do that very often.”

“I can tell.” He curls his fingers into his palms, testing out what he can do with his hands now that they have an extra layer. Baekhyun isn’t sure what he should do. He feels like he needs to say or do something else before he leaves but he also feels like he’s been hovering far too long. The artist has stopped looking at his hands and is looking at Baekhyun now, like his skin is transparent.

“Ah,” says Baekhyun, stupidly. “I’m gonna go home now.”

“You were running that fast to go home?”

“No, I was late for class, but it’s finished now. I think the second one is half done too, so I’ll just go home.”

“I didn’t ask you to stay,” he says, looking caught between annoyed and surprised and something else that Baekhyun thinks might be a little softer, but that’s probably just because he wants it to be.

“No, I know. But it was my fault you fell and I wanted to make sure you were okay,” Baekhyun smiles. “ _Are_ you okay?”

“I’m fine.” 

“I kind of want to get you ice cream,” he laughs. “Because I always eat ice cream when I hurt myself.” He actually smiles at that, a small smile where the corners of his mouth get a little deeper but not much else. It eases the worry that is sitting at the back of Baekhyun’s throat, just a little.

“No, thank you,” he says quietly. “I’m going to go home too.”

“Can you carry your books?”

“If you... If you put them into my arms, I can.” He holds out his arms and Baekhyun carefully stacks them, avoiding his hands completely. They are such thick books that when they’re all stacked he can rest his chin on top of them and Baekhyun laughs and his cheeks colour a little and Baekhyun sort of wants to ruffle his hair, but he doesn’t. He knows he can make an overwhelming first impression, even without crashing into a person at high speed. Especially if he touches people half as much as he wants to.

“You really should get a backpack,” he says, clapping his hands once and then swinging his arms at his sides.

“I live close by, I didn’t plan on being injured.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You said that already.”

“I know.”

They look at one another under harsh bathroom lights. Baekhyun is very aware that he is dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt that gapes at the neck and has holes at the hem and he wants to explain that it’s deliberate, the way he looks, that he didn’t have any choice, that he doesn’t usually look like this. He’d just run out of time. But then someone opens the door to the bathroom and it startles them both into movement. Baekhyun bundles the remaining medical supplies into the plastic bag and holds the door open so the guy he almost killed and his books can leave. He doesn’t say anything else, when Baekhyun follows him out he nods awkwardly over his books and then he walks away. He heads toward the double doors that open to the main campus courtyard. Baekhyun watches him go, clean and neat and self-contained, a wrapped parcel of a person, and he rubs at his bare arms and tugs at the hem of his t-shirt and then turns to go his own way.

He picks up bungeoppang from the convenience store on his way back to the apartment; peace offerings for Chanyeol. The air is sharp and clean outside and he takes his time walking. He can’t remember a time where he got so many hours of uninterrupted sleep. He feels more awake than he has in months. But he pushes that away when he remembers that he’s missed two hours of tutorials and that if he misses any more he’ll lose a small percentage of his final grade. Mandatory attendance is the worst thing in the world. He should stop sleeping altogether.

At the apartment he knocks on Chanyeol’s bedroom door and when Chanyeol says he can open it he walks in, a packet of ice cream held out before him with both hands.

“I’m a terrible friend,” he says, head bowed. “Please accept this delicious snack as penance.”

“Have you eaten?” Chanyeol asks. He is sitting on his bed, headphones around his neck, a pad of blank sheet music in his lap. He puts his pencil behind his ear.

“No, but-”

“Oh my god,” Chanyeol gets to his feet and is in front of Baekhyun in two strides. He grabs him by the shoulders, turns him around, marches him back out to the kitchen. Baekhyun thinks that it’s unfair he uses his size so often to manhandle him into places he doesn’t want to be but he doesn’t say anything. Being in a fight with Chanyeol is like being in a fight with a puppy; futile and frustrating and doomed to fail. Chanyeol pushes him into a chair at the dining table, plucks the bungeoppang from his hands, turns to the kitchen bench while he unwraps it. He serves Baekhyun the sundubu jjigae from breakfast, another of his three dishes, and rice and kimchi and then he stares at him while he eats it.

“I’m not a child,” says Baekhyun. “I can eat unsupervised.”

“You are so a child,” Chanyeol laughs, taking an extravagant bite of his ice cream then wincing as the cold hits his teeth. “I’m going to start pinning notes to your sweaters. _If lost, please return to Park Chanyeol._ ”

Baekhyun laughs and then reaches across and takes the ice cream from where it’s hanging out of Chanyeol’s mouth. He takes a bite and returns it, poking at Chanyeol’s cheek with an index finger. Red bean and ice cream and chili really don’t taste good together but Baekhyun doesn’t care. He does it more to be able to touch his friend, not that he needs an excuse. Chanyeol’s been with him since high school.

“I almost killed a cute boy today,” he says then, in the soft silence that comes with eating.

“ _What_?”

“I ran into him and he fell and cut his hands up. I missed both my classes.”

“Are you... are you okay?”

“Not really,” Baekhyun laughs, twirls his spoon between his fingers. “I feel kind of like I’m going to fail everything now.”

“That’s impossible,” says Chanyeol, firmly. “I forget to go to class all the time and I’m still the smartest person in the world. It’s because I eat my vegetables. It’s why I’m so tall, too, and you’re so stunted.”

“I hate you.”

“How cute was the boy?”

“He was...” Baekhyun laughs, “... he was cute, I don’t know. He was annoyed and quiet. He had glasses.”

“Did you get his number?”

“No, I was too busy thinking I’d ruined my life and his all in one go.”

“Well, if it’s meant to be you’ll find each other again and you can live out your failure together.”

“That’s beautiful, Chanyeol.”

Baekhyun spends his afternoon studying. He doesn’t take a break until it’s dark and Chanyeol makes him eat again. It reminds him of Kyungsoo and his missing door and he turns on his phone and is a little disappointed when he has no texts. He keeps it on silent instead of turning it off and he puts it in his pocket. Chanyeol doesn’t say anything about the door either and Baekhyun doesn’t feel like he can bring it up. They eat quietly, kicking each other under the table instead of talking, and then Baekhyun goes back to studying. He stays up late, reciting his notes to the windows, stark black against the white and neon of his walls. Then he writes his notes out again, long hand, until the words stick inside his skull. He still feels like he’s ruined his chances, like he’ll never be anything. He writes out his notes again and again and again and chews his pen until it stops working.

After midnight, he gets a text.

**(00:47) Tell Chanyeol I can’t study like this**

Baekhyun laughs. It makes him happier than it should, a text after dark. He feels thin-skinned and stressed and so tired he might already be dreaming. He wants to know more people. He isn’t good when he’s alone.

(00:47) you can study here~

There is long enough of a gap between texts that Baekhyun has time to think he’s done something wrong. He always does this, pushes too hard too soon, it’s not like he's friends with this guy. In fact, his association with Chanyeol most likely makes him an enemy. He tosses his phone from hand to hand, paces the room, jumps on his bed. He grins when he finally gets another text.

**(00:55) I can manage. Thank you though, I’ll keep it in mind**

(00:55) my room has no chanyeol and infinite post-its

**(00:56) Sounds like heaven**

(00:57) i’ll even let you pick the music

**(00:57) Is silence an option?**

(00:58) not with me around

**(00:58) I’ll think about it**

(00:58) i’ll wait for you kyungsoo~

Kyungsoo doesn’t reply and Baekhyun throws himself back into study for an hour longer. He sets his alarm carefully, checks it and double checks it, counts up the hours of sleep it will give him. Five hours and forty seven minutes. It’s enough. It has to be enough. He wriggles under his blankets until his heart stops beating so fast and his skin stops tingling and he feels more like he can fall asleep without putting himself at risk. He dreams of going to class, sitting in a lecture theatre, being taught about things he doesn’t understand. The lecturer is speaking another language and Baekhyun is frozen in his seat, unable to speak at all. When he wakes up to his alarm he feels like he’s lived a whole day of classes in his sleep instead of actually sleeping. He presses his knuckles into his eye sockets, shakes his limbs out, and gets up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im gonna try get this thing out quickly!!! im quite bad at doing things quickly but this is going ok so far. thank you for reading!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's pretty obvious i think but just in case: bbh's texts are plain, ksoo's are bold and pcy's are in italics.

When Baekhyun is fourteen and Baekbeom is sixteen, their parents are killed in a car accident. It’s a drunk driver and a wet road and they come back from school to an empty house. Baekhyun convinces Baekbeom to let him play Starcraft instead of doing his homework. Baekbeom sits on Baekhyun’s bed and reads through a maths textbook with one eye and watches him play with the other. It is not unusual for their parents to be out so late.

They don’t have any extended family and they’re sent to an orphanage first and then a foster home and then another one and then another. They’re shuffled from social worker to social worker and Baekhyun hates them all. There is a woman with a tight smile and too many rings and a man with curly nose hairs like steel wool who clears his throat after every word he says. None of them tell him anything useful. Baekbeom studies and studies and studies and Baekhyun runs away and comes back and runs away again. He is the reason they never last long in one place, not Baekbeom.

When he is fifteen and Baekbeom is seventeen they find a good place and good people but it feels like they’ve been without them for much longer. Their social worker asks Baekhyun about computer games and his favourite places instead of about his parents, and the older couple who take them in are gentle with their questions and clumsy with their love and close to being the sort of people the Byun brothers might feel comfortable with. They settle into something that makes Baekhyun think that maybe he might not have to run again, at least not anytime soon, so he doesn’t. He talks to the social worker once a month about nothing and everything and when he is seventeen he decides he wants to be someone like that too.

Baekhyun thinks it’s strange, that he’s twenty now and he still thinks about running away. It feels like something he should’ve grown out of. Chanyeol isn’t home, he’s probably got an early shift at the campus bookstore where he works, so the apartment is empty. Baekhyun never knows what to do without him there, he’s not big enough to fill it up the way Chanyeol does or the way they do together, even though the apartment is small. He isn’t good without people. He drags his fingernails along the bench in the kitchen, trying to make noise. He opens the fridge and closes it, spilling out cold light and then stopping it back up and turning the lino white to grey. He steals one of Chanyeol’s vitamin drinks and a mango from the oft-neglected fruit bowl and he cuts thin slices from it as he gathers up his stuff for class. He opens his laptop so he can play music as loud as it will let him. He could leave, if he wanted to. He could catch a bus to Baekbeom in Busan and forget about the four years he’s spent dreaming of being a social worker. He’d have to steal a pair of Chanyeol’s good headphones, to drown his doubt in bubblegum.

“Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb” he sings along with the music and then he laughs. He has class at nine. He gets dressed.

When he steps out into the hall and locks the door behind him he pretends it’s for the last time and it makes him shiver a little, just the thought.

He checks his phone as he’s leaving the building and he’s surprised to see he has a message. He’d assumed he’d scared Kyungsoo off, because he said he likes silence when he studies and because Baekhyun always treats acquaintances like they’re friends, even over text. Kyungsoo isn’t even an acquaintance, he’s just pixels. But Baekhyun’s phone buzzes against his thigh and he grins at the screen as he’s walking.

**(08:33) It’s unfair that you know my name and I don’t know yours**

It makes him inordinately smug. He is Byun Baekhyun, a man who can make a friend using nothing but words on a screen, as charming in text as he is in person. He types out his reply as he waits to cross the road, remembering that he practically killed someone small and cute yesterday because he wasn’t looking where he was going.

(08:40) are you asking to be friends??!!

**(08:41) I just want to know the name of the person assisting Chanyeol in stealing from me**

**(08:41) For legal reasons**

(08:41) you’re a bit obsessed with chanyeol, huh

**(08:43) I’m obsessed with having a bedroom door**

(08:43) i’m baekhyun, are we friends now?

**(08:43) No**

**(08:43) It’s nice to meet you Baekhyun**

Baekhyun wonders what he looks like. Maybe he’s cute, like the guy he’d knocked down, pretty lips and wide eyes. Maybe he looks like Chanyeol, half a puppy and half a giraffe. It doesn’t matter. He really needs to stop fantasising about having friends. He doesn’t have time for anything more than throwaway texts. Still, he’s happy to be talking to Kyungsoo, even if it’s only for a little while.

His tutorial is interesting that morning and the tutor likes some of the points he brings up during discussion. He’s good at voicing his opinion, just not at writing it down. He’s good at being part of a group, too, even if it only lasts until the hour is up. But some of the other students remind him of the social workers he hadn’t liked as a kid and that’s so depressing he can’t really be around them any more than he has to.

He goes to the convenience store between classes and buys strawberry milk. The carton has a cute strawberry girl on the front and Baekhyun takes a picture of it because he used to take one every time he bought food with cute packaging. There’s a whole folder of them on his phone. He sends the picture to Chanyeol and then, after a moment's hesitation, he sends it to Kyungsoo too. He has no reason for it other than it makes him feel a little less lonely, sending something so meaningless to more than one person. He used to send those sort of things to a lot of people, cute food or flowers he saw on his walks or cats he met or clouds, but for a while he’d stopped taking pictures of anything and he’s only just started to pick it back up. He takes pictures of his post-its now, so he doesn’t have to carry around the little bundles of neon, and of the pages of library books when he got so many overdue fines they stopped letting him take any home.

_(10:12) that doesn’t count as a fruit_

_(10:12) get a banana_

(10:13) the banana flavour is way less fruit-like

_(09:13) no get an actual banana they’re good for you_

(10:13) real bananas are terrible i can’t believe you

_(10:14) when you get rickets or scurvy or whatever don’t come crying to me_

Baekhyun goes back to the convenience store and buys a banana and he shouldn’t really feel that successful, just for buying a piece of fruit, but he does. His second piece of fruit for the day. It’s not nearly as delicious as the milk. He goes to his second lecture and takes notes in his sparkly notebook and sits the empty carton of milk in front of him on the desk until he finds he can’t stop counting the seeds on the girl’s strawberry hat and he has to put it away. There are seven seeds. There are three eyelets in each loop of the lace on her skirt. He takes four pages of notes in crooked, cramped handwriting.

**(10:46) Why have you sent me this?**

**(10:46) Strawberry milk is disgusting**

(11:33) because we’re friends now and friends send each other pictures of cute milk

(11:33) and strawberry milk is the nectar of the gods

**(11:34) It’s barely better than banana**

(11:34) did you know that banana flavoured stuff doesn't taste like bananas because it’s based on an extinct banana strain?

**(11:34) Do you really believe that?**

**(11:34) It's not true**

(11:35) it is!!!!!!

**(11:36) No it's not**

(11:38) ok the internet is on your side about this

(11:38) but i still think it's true

**(11:39) Why would you get anything that isn't chocolate anyway?**

(11:39) strawberry’s the only flavour that's as cute as i am ^.~

**(11:41) Do you have pink hair and a strawberry shaped hat too?**

(11:41) actually i did have pink hair for awhile and i do have a strawberry beanie

**(11:42) Are you a real person or a cartoon?**

**(11:42) I’m making your contact image the strawberry girl**

(11:42) just call me strawberry boy~

(11:42) what do i get for your picture?

**(11:43) Nothing**

(11:43) fine i’ll ask chanyeol

A moment later Baekhyun receives an image, a screencap of a geodude from Pokemon. He laughs, a little confused but mostly just charmed by it. It doesn’t do anything to help the image of Kyungsoo he has in his head. No, he doesn’t have an image, just an empty doorway. And now he’s a small grey rock with arms, floating above the ground, and Baekhyun is a strawberry girl.

**(11:46) My roommate suggested this**

**(11:46) He’s dead now**

(11:47) ah you’re a rock, this explains why chanyeol is scared of you

(11:47) maybe he would have picked geodude too if i asked him

(11:48) ok it’s your picture now, and i even changed your name to geosoo

**(11:48) I hate that**

**(11:48) What was it before?**

(11:48) chanyeol’s nemesis. did you have a name for me?

**(11:49) You were ‘Fuck you Chanyeol’ and then you were ‘Door’ and now you are ‘Baekhyun’**

(11:49) you have no imagination

**(11:50) Now you are ‘Strawberry boy’**

(11:50) ♡♡♡

Later, after class, when Baekhyun’s home, he studies in the living room. He piles his books up on the coffee table and lies on the couch. He has a post-it stuck to each finger and he holds them above his face and squints at his handwriting.

“Something about vulnerable children,” he reads out loud. “Early intervention? Early intervention.”

He can't imagine running anymore, even without Chanyeol there. He feels a strange sort of ambition suddenly, to beat academia and come out at the end unscathed. A degree in his hand and children to save and families to create. Grand, impossible things. He sits up, discards the post-its, picks up his laptop. He writes for a little over an hour without stopping and it doesn't drain him. It just makes him feel, for once, like he’s winning.

Chanyeol comes back later on and he sits down next to Baekhyun, poking at the soles of his feet until he shuffles back enough that there is room for both of them. Baekhyun stops his music. Chanyeol has his headphones around his neck and without girl groups drowning everything out the music he’s been listening to is audible, echoey and strange. He turns it off and sighs, this great big exhalation like it’s made up of every breath he’s ever taken. Baekhyun digs his toes into Chanyeol’s thigh until he scowls and laughs and rolls his eyes.

“Did you eat?” he asks.

“I got a banana, like you said,” says Baekhyun, grinning, “and I had ramyun here.”

“Good,” Chanyeol smiles, leans back, shuts his eyes. “How’s study?”

“I’m honestly a genius. How’s the music thing?”

“When I start writing songs for Taeyeon I’ll introduce you to her.”

They fall into easy silence and Chanyeol puts his headphones back on and scribbles on a pad of empty sheet music and Baekhyun starts to write again. Maybe, when he looks at what he’s written in the morning, he’ll realise that none of it makes sense, but for the moment he feels like he’s finally making progress. There is only the faintest reminder of the panic of the day before, drifting around in his head. When he stops in the evening to eat he doesn't feel guilty about it and he takes his time eating and talking to Chanyeol and drawing invisible flowers on the table with his index finger; all the things he wishes he could always do, if he had the time.

“What does Kyungsoo look like?” he asks, because he keeps thinking about how on Kyungsoo’s phone he’s cute and made of strawberries and Kyungsoo is a monster made of stone. Chanyeol narrows his eyes over his glass of water.

“Why?”

“No reason,” Baekhyun pouts, because contact profile pictures aren’t a proper reason, because he doesn’t really have a proper reason to ask, he just wants to know.

“I thought you were going to marry the cute guy you maimed,” Chanyeol laughs. “So fickle.”

“Whatever, you almost turned Jongdae down because the coffee shop girl smiled at you.”

“It was definitely a flirty smile and not a customer service smile and anyway, she still might be my one true love.”

“What about Jongdae?”

“He’s not talking to me because I named all of my meowths after him and won’t evolve any of them.”

“How many do you have?”

“Seventeen.”

“He’s really too good for you, Chanyeol.”

“Maybe,” Chanyeol concedes. “Anyway, Kyungsoo? I don’t know what he looks like. He’s small but he could punch you in the face with just his eyes.”

“Is he really that scary?”

“No, I don’t know, Jongin doesn’t think he is but Jongin never broke his door so...”

“How close are you to fixing that?”

“Sunday,” says Chanyeol, with great certainty. “On Sunday Do Kyungsoo will have a door again.”

After dinner Baekhyun has a long shower. When his parents died he’d spent a lot of time in the shower, sometimes hours, opening his mouth to warm water and palming his wet hair over his ears until all he could hear was the sound of rain. It’s something of a comfort to him still, standing under water, and he does it now because he feels good and he wants to continue feeling good. After his shower he changes the sheets on his bed and he sits under the covers as he studies, clean limbs against clean cotton.

“I promise to drink strawberry milk everyday,” he tells his thickest textbook. “I promise to read you ten times before summer vacation.”

He thinks he might go with Chanyeol on Sunday to Kyungsoo’s place, if he’s allowed. If studying permits it. He wants a more accurate contact profile picture. Maybe even a real one. He sort of wants to send Kyungsoo a selfie, just because, or maybe one from when he had pink hair. Jongdae had done it for him in the bathroom sink the day they met, painting over the patchy bleach-blonde he’d had since just after high school graduation. They’d locked Chanyeol out so they could talk about him and Baekhyun remembers thinking that of course Chanyeol finds the best guy in the world before the first week of class is even over. Of course, of course, of course. He hasn’t seen Jongdae in a little while and he misses him. He misses his pink hair. He misses playing LoL and drinking and lying on the floor with Jongdae and Chanyeol, talking shit.

These thoughts come close to killing his good mood and he sighs and flicks his fingernail against the pages of his textbook. Going to Kyungsoo’s would be the first time he’s left the apartment for anything other than class in over a month. He makes Chanyeol get his groceries or he gets them delivered. Nothing has held his attention enough to pull him out of his fear of failure. But he wants to meet Kyungsoo properly and really it just makes sense for him to go with Chanyeol. He’s been acting as an intermediary for almost three whole days. Maybe Kyungsoo will give him a reward, for delivering Chanyeol and his door.

“I’ll make him take me to get bubble tea, I think,” he tells the textbook, smiling to himself, pricking the pad of his finger on the sharp corner of a page. He sighs again, turns his dreamy music up, and moves on to the next chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i changed the age difference between baekhyun and baekbeom just for.. idek. because. also this... is an au where pokemon go has been released in korea haha. thank you for reading !! i hope to have a new chapter soon !!


	4. Chapter 4

Baekhyun is dreaming of the ocean. It’s not a beach he knows, it’s all rocks and wild surf and clinging seaweed instead of golden sand and endless blue. There is a sound like a cannon firing over everything, thunder maybe, or the heartbeat of something impossibly huge. Baekhyun ignores it and focusses on walking to the water. He is ankle deep and then calf deep and then, very suddenly, thigh deep and close to losing his footing. His jeans are heavy and the beach is empty and he’s sure he’s the only thing still alive in the world. The cannon is getting louder but he won’t let himself be swallowed by it. He brushes a wet hand across his face and wakes up, almost throwing himself off the bed in the process. He pushes his hair off his face. It’s dark still and the sound from his dreams is echoing through the walls, still loud and heavy and _real_. Then he hears a person’s voice and he groans and struggles from his blankets to his feet.

Jongdae is supposed to have a key. He works strange hours and he comes to their apartment to sleep sometimes and he’s _supposed_ to be able to let himself in instead of wailing through the keyhole and banging at the door. Baekhyun gets up because Chanyeol won’t. He’s the only person immune to Kim Jongdae’s voice. He leaves his room, half asleep, half in dreams, alone on a beach.

“I’m going to kill your firstborn,” he says, when he opens the door.

“You can try,” says Jongdae, grinning with all his teeth. Back when they first met, pink hair dye and bathrooms, Baekhyun had thought Jongdae was cute, because of his curly smile and sharp cheekbones. He’s too annoying to be cute now. It doesn’t stop Baekhyun wanting to hug him though, in the early morning, because he always looks so huggable and because Baekhyun is mostly still asleep and because the beach had been so empty. He punches him in the shoulder as he walks passed instead. Jongdae pinches his cheek.

“Sorry, Baek,” he says, and Baekhyun shrugs him off.

Chanyeol emerges from his room then, hair everywhere, blinking and rubbing at his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, just stumbles forward, wraps his arms around Jongdae’s head, crushing him to his chest, and manhandles him back into his room. The door slams. Baekhyun is alone again. He kicks out at the floor and almost over-balances and then he stops back to his room. He grabs his phone and the white-blue light it casts around the room reminds Baekhyun of cold water and wet sand.

(05:32) why do couples exist?

(05:32) why is there love anyway?

(05:32) why don’t i get to have any???

He sends this to Kyungsoo and then he falls back against his pillows. There are two hours and twenty eight minutes until he has to get up. He dreams of the beach again, grey and empty and endless. When his alarm breaks through it all he presses his palm against his phone until it stops. His jaw is aching, he must have been grinding his teeth in his sleep.

“This isn’t fair,” he tells his ceiling.

It takes him until he’s dressed to remember the texts he sent. He stares at the messages in horror, unable to fathom how he had even managed to send them, he’d been at least seventy percent asleep. And why had he sent them to _Kyungsoo_? He usually texted Baekbeom when he was drunk or upset. He usually texted people he’d hooked up with once or twice. He _never_ said anything about love. He doesn't have time for that stuff. He turns his phone off.

“This isn’t fair,” he says again, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes and then to the sides of his jaw, trying to push the ache out. “I’m a good person.”

Chanyeol isn’t awake for him to whine at so he steals the rest of his mango and mutters swear words to his shut door. He sticks three post-its to the fridge door explaining the exact number of candy Jongdae owes him now for ruining his life. Candy and a new sparkly notebook. Candy and a new sparkly notebook and a time machine. He’s never turning his phone on again.

In class he talks far too much and makes far too little sense. The other students laugh but it isn’t in a good way, it’s in a nervous way, and he can’t seem to stop himself from spilling out everything he’s thinking, all of the nonsense crowded in his head, a thousand and one post-its worth.

“How can I even do this job if I’m like this?” he asks his tutor. “No, sorry, don’t answer that.”

After class he turns his phone on and then off again before he can see if he has a message. He buys a bag of chewy green apple candy and he sits on a bench outside the library with plans to eat them all. It calms him down a little bit because he has to concentrate on chewing. It’s really not a big deal, he tells himself, sending a stupid text. It means less than nothing. He still wants to fling himself onto the ground in despair or tear his hair out or something equally dramatic, but he doesn’t. He just eats more candy. It stretches out his jaw some, makes it feel less like he’s been chewing on rocks. He’s halfway through the bag when he sees the guy he knocked down, hurrying across the quad. He’s staring fixedly ahead and his hands aren’t bandaged and he’s still as cute as anything. He’s wearing all black and the sleeves of his sweater bunch at his wrists. His hair flies back from his forehead he’s walking so fast. Baekhyun sort of wants to knock him down again, just so they can talk, but he doesn’t.

He checks his phone eventually, too curious to be properly afraid. The worst thing that might happen is that Kyungsoo asks him not to text him anymore and that doesn’t matter because they’ll meet on Sunday and Baekhyun will be so charming in real life that they have to stay friends. He holds his phone at arm’s length to open the reply.

**(09:07) That’s a bad time to send texts like that, are you alright?**

It kind of makes him want to cry. He chews on the cuff of his sweater because he can’t eat anymore candy. His stomach hurts and his jaw hurts. He wants to sleep. He screws up his face and types his reply with one eye closed like that will make it better.

(10:38) i’m really sorry!! I’m fine;; just the sort of thing that comes with having a roommate with a boyfriend. i hope i didn’t wake you up haha;;

**(10:38) You didn’t**

**(10:38) I know that feeling, but it won’t always be true**

**(10:38) You won’t always feel like that**

(10:39) i know, i’m just tired i think. thank you

**(10:39) You should sleep. Are you home? My apartment is close to the main campus if you aren’t. I’m not home but you can sleep there if you need**

**(10:39) It has no door obviously but....**

(10:39) haha i’m ok, i still have class today. thank you though

(10:39) really

(10:40) thank you

(10:40) you’re really nice

**(10:41) Let me know if you need anything**

(10:41) i’m starting to think cy was wrong when he said you had no soul

**(10:42) No he was right**

**(10:42)** **(¬_¬)**

(10:42) ♥‿♥

Baekhyun wonders suddenly if this might count as flirting. He isn’t very good at telling the difference between flirting and normal conversation. Chanyeol once told him that flirting was his default and he thinks it’s sort of true. He’s lost count of the number of times people have thought he was trying to pick them up when really he was just having a good time talking to them. He doesn’t think he’s trying to flirt with Kyungsoo, he just doesn’t really know how else to make him know he’s grateful, especially when he only has text. Maybe he should call him. He stares at his phone, at the call button, at the little geodude next to Kyungsoo’s messages. No. He’d probably just end up scaring him.

When Baekhyun gets home that evening there is a door in the living room. It has no hinges and it’s leaning perilously against the couch and taking up far more room than it has any right to. Baekhyun nudges at it with his foot and it wobbles. Chanyeol appears then, wild around the eyes, and Baekhyun raises his eyebrows at him.

“I thought you were just giving him money.”

“No way,” Chanyeol laughs. “This is much better.”

“Where did you even get it?”

“I have a drill too,” he says, ignoring the question, eyes wide. He looks exactly like someone who should never ever have access to a drill. Baekhyun chews on his lip, slides his palm up the side of the door, hooks his fingers over the top.

“Can I come?” he asks, twisting the door handle. “On Sunday?”

“Don’t you have to study?” Chanyeol waggles his eyebrows, _winks_. Baekhyun wants to kill him a little bit and then he wants to kill him even more when his cheeks get hot. He fans at his face.

“ _Chanyeollie_ ,” he whines, to cover up his embarrassment. He grabs Chanyeol by the hands, pulling at him until he laughs. “Be nice to me.”

“I’m always nice to you. Jongdae left you a present.”

“What is it? Is it food? Give it to me.”

Chanyeol laughs and pulls him into the kitchen. It’s food, of course, because when Jongdae isn’t giving him sparkly notebooks he’s giving him food. Baekhyun thinks Chanyeol might tell him to, but he doesn’t care. This time it’s bread, custard buns and coconut bread, sweet and buttery. For the millionth time that day, Baekhyun feels like crying. He eats a custard bun immediately, taking far too big a bite, the filling oozing out and sticking to his lips.

“This doesn’t mean I forgive him,” he says, through his mouthful.

“You’re disgusting,” says Chanyeol, but he says it fondly.

Baekhyun doesn’t study that night. He opens a book and finds he can’t. He can’t look at the words, he can’t open his course website, he can’t open his half-finished assignments. He takes down all his post-its and puts them in a drawer so he can’t see them either and when that’s not enough he goes into Chanyeol’s room and lies on his bed. Chanyeol doesn’t say anything but he plays a song that Baekhyun likes, something he made when they were still in high school and Baekhyun had more people around him to keep him from imploding, even if they weren’t his parents. He wants to call Kyungsoo and it annoys him that he should want to do that. He doesn’t know Kyungsoo. Kyungsoo is just time-stamps and a geodude and _eyes that could punch you in the face_ , whatever that means. He wants to call Baekbeom and he knows that that would actually be a sensible thing to do so he can’t do that either. Talking to Baekbeom is too close to admitting defeat. He isn’t beaten yet, just tired.

“You should take a semester off,” says Chanyeol, gently, when neither of them have spoken for far too long.

“Stop,” says Baekhyun, into a pillow. “Do you have painkillers? I have a headache.”

“In the bathroom cabinet.”

“Thank you.” He gets up, presses his palm to Chanyeol’s shoulder as he walks passed, pretends not to hear him sighing.

He takes a couple of paracetamol and some water and he goes back to his room. He still can’t study, but he can’t do anything else either. He lies upside down on his bed so he can climb his feet up the wall. He sings all of his favourite songs at the top of his lungs until Chanyeol yells at him to be quiet. He doesn’t sleep. He plays through every level of a terrible Disney princess matching card game and then he plays through every level again. When he finally opens his laptop it’s one in the morning and he still won’t be able to study but he also knows he won’t be able to sleep either. He’s too tired to sleep. He watches through old episodes of his favourite dramas, all the parts that make him happiest. Gong Yoo in a butter yellow polo shirt and fireball sunflowers on the wall. Jun Ji-hyun rapping badly in an expensive car, wearing sunglasses and white gloves.

Baekhyun wonders whether every door can fit into every door frame. What if the door in their living room doesn’t fit at Kyungsoo’s place? Is there a standard size for doors? What if there are gaps at the seams that let in draughts when it’s cold? Maybe Chanyeol has been talking to Kyungsoo too, getting measurements. That unsettles him a little and he frowns at his phone, scrolls through the messages they’ve been exchanging. Maybe Kyungsoo got Chanyeol’s real number off Jongin. He’d have it because they sometimes perform together, Chanyeol’s music and Jongin’s movement.

It’s four in the morning and there are grey shadows at the edges of his vision. His heart beat might be too fast, his jaw is still sore, his skin is too hot. He opens up one of his assignments, scrolls to the end where he stopped writing mid sentence, closes it again. He takes his bundle of post-its out of his desk drawer and sticks them back to the wall. At five, he falls asleep on top of his blankets, still dressed, and he dreams of dirt under his fingernails and grit under his skin, as annoying as a stone in his shoe.

Chanyeol wakes him up in the early afternoon, shaking him by the shoulder. He blinks and blinks and scrubs a hand through his hair and blinks again.

“Did I die?” he asks, through sleep-sticky lips. He sits up. Chanyeol is frowning.

“When did you sleep?”

“Um,” Baekhyun hums. “Late. Early. It’s okay, I don’t have Friday classes.”

“It’s three weeks into term,” Chanyeol sighs. “How is this happening to you already?”

“I don’t... I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re not sleeping properly, you’re not eating properly, if you’re not studying you’re freaking out about how you’re not studying, it’s...”

“That’s not fair,” Baekhyun protests. “Why did you wake me up to tell me this? I’m fine, it’s... it’s two and a half more years.”

“It’s been two and a half weeks and you’re practically dead, Baekhyun,” says Chanyeol. He looks frustrated and sad and it pulls at Baekhyun’s heart. He’s too tired to listen to this. He wants to tell Chanyeol that he doesn’t understand it either, he doesn’t know why he can’t find a balance between too much and nothing at all. He walks his fingers down the inner seams of his jeans. All of his clothing feels fused to his skin by sleep. He needs to go to the library.

“I’ll try harder,” he says, quietly.

“No,” Chanyeol laughs, a bitter sound. “No, please don’t.”

Chanyeol skips his classes and Jongdae comes over too and they all spend the day together. Baekhyun feels wrung out and strange but they’re always good as a group, even at their worst. They play video games and Jongdae makes up nonsense lyrics to Chanyeol’s half finished songs and he and Baekhyun sing them so loudly the guy in the apartment next to them comes over and tells them to stop. They cook together and Baekhyun is only allowed to chop ingredients but he thinks he does it well. They talk about high school and Jongdae whines because he wasn’t there and Chanyeol laces their fingers together, rubs his nose in Jongdae’s fluffy hair. They drink soju and forget they’re supposed to be being quiet and sing louder and Baekhyun laughs so much his stomach hurts and he has to sit down.

“I love you, Chanyeol,” he murmurs, late at night, when all of them are on the couch, drunk and falling into each other.

“You too,” Chanyeol laughs, a slow lazy rumble.

“But you love me better,” says Jongdae.

“I love you different,” Chanyeol corrects.

Baekhyun thinks that maybe what was different about him in high school is that he had other people. He had his parents and his brother and then when he didn’t have his parents anymore he had his social worker and the couple who took them in, new parents, a different sort of love. He had teachers who looked out for him and gave him more chances than he deserved and he was smart enough that he could do it all easily. It’s different in university. No one cares if he fails. He doesn’t know anyone in his classes and it feels too late to find anyone now. Baekbeom is in Busan and so are his foster parents and so is the social worker. He isn’t smart enough that he can coast through this.

Jongdae and Chanyeol fall asleep on the couch and Baekhyun finds a blanket and covers them with it. He brushes his teeth and washes his face and sticks his tongue out at himself in the mirror. He goes to his room and checks his phone for the first time that day.

**(13:43) I hope today was better for you**

Baekhyun sucks his lower lip into his mouth, bites down. He hits the call button before he can convince himself not to and Kyungsoo picks up on the fifth ring, just as he’s about to hang up.

“Hello?”

“Chanyeol has your door,” Baekhyun blurts, before his thoughts can catch up. “It’s in our living room, we’re going to bring it to you on Sunday.”

“Um,” says Kyungsoo. “Alright... Baekhyun.” His voice is low and careful and he pronounces every word exactly. It’s calming, somehow, and it quiets the mess in Baekhyun’s head a little.

“Is it weird that I called you? Sorry, it’s probably weird. I’m really... I didn’t check my phone all day but I wanted to say thank you, for being nice to me.”

“It’s... it’s a little weird that you called me. I thought it would be polite to see how you were today. Are you feeling better?”

“Polite?” Baekhyun laughs. “Ah, you’re breaking my heart. I’m fine, I’m happy today, how are you?”

“Good,” says Kyungsoo, after a pause. “I’m good.”

“Tell me something you did today,” says Baekhyun. He climbs up onto his bed, arranges himself so he’s sitting, cross-legged, leaning against the wall. He puts a pillow in his lap, he shuts his eyes.

“Oh, um...” Kyungsoo goes silent again, for so long Baekhyun almost thinks he’s been cut off, almost says his name. “I finished an assignment I have due soon, I did laundry. It was good, but not really interesting.”

“When is your assignment due?”

“Sunday.”

“You finished so far ahead! I can’t do that. Even if I start it weeks before it’s due I’ll still hand it in one minute before.”

“But as long as you’re not late then that’s fine.”

“Chanyeol said you study a lot. I study a lot too, but I do it... badly.”

“You asked about me?”

“Of course! We’re friends, right?”

“Y-yes,” says Kyungsoo, and the little trip in his voice makes Baekhyun wish he was there, so he could tease him about it properly, “we’re friends.”

“We should study together one day, maybe you’ll make me better at it.”

“Okay,” he says. “Do you... do you know what time it is?” Baekhyun frowns, takes the phone from his ear to check. It’s one in the morning again.

“Oh wow,” his voice comes out uneven, wobbly and breathless. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”

“No, it’s fine,” he says, and there’s a smile in his voice. “I was awake.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

They talk for a little while longer. Baekhyun worries about the door fitting and Kyungsoo assures him that it will. They talk about bad study habits and good ones and Kyungsoo rejects every candy suggestion Baekhyun makes but they both agree that chocolate is good in any form except white. Baekhyun slips further down his wall, from sitting to leaning to lying. Kyungsoo’s voice gets lower and softer and raspy at the edges in a way that makes Baekhyun feel like he’s right next to him, whispering in his ear. He manages to say goodbye before he falls asleep, but hanging up feels strange. Maybe it should feel strange, talking to someone you’ve never met in person so late at night, even just talking about chocolate. He brushes it aside. He’s always been good at making fast friends and once they meet on Sunday it won’t be strange. He gets changed, drinks enough water that he won’t be completely wrecked in the morning, climbs back into bed and shuts his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think maybe they will meet next chapter. or maybe ill drag it out, thirty chapters and a movie yknow? ummm the dramas bbh watches are coffee prince and my love from another star...... obviously... thank you for reading !!!


	5. Chapter 5

Saturday is quiet. Baekhyun gets back into studying and Chanyeol stops trying to make him stop. He’s a little hungover, still a little but out of his skin, but he can concentrate better than he’s been able to for days. He’s lost sense of his post-its though; they’re stuck to the walls strangely, in an order he doesn’t understand anymore. He leaves them up, hopeful that they’ll make sense eventually. He leaves his door open so Chanyeol can drift in and out if he wants and Chanyeol does the same and the tumbling of keyboard keys as he works out a song somehow keeps Baekhyun grounded.

He has two assignments due in a week, three thousand words each, on anti-discriminatory practice and the curriculum. They’re important things, they’re _essential_ things, but he can’t bring himself to care when they’re just words. It would be different if he was working, if he was able to match up curriculum to practice. It would be different in real life.

Kyungsoo is in the back of his mind often, his voice stuck under his skin like a song in his head. He leaves his room to inspect the door for imperfections, things that might mean they can’t go and see him after all. He presses his fingerprints carefully onto the door handle, edge to edge, and then he rubs them off with his sleeve pulled over the heel of his palm. He eats the rest of the bread Jongdae got for him and it sits in his stomach, sticky and sweet, and it’s even harder to sit still after that. He flips his phone over in his hand, digs his thumbnail under the glass screen protector until it bubbles, presses it down flat again. It’s his fourth screen protector in less than a year, the others had been shattered and then picked apart by sharp fingernails. He taps his phone against his bottom teeth, highlights a paragraph on his laptop, deletes it and restores it and deletes it again. He tugs at the joints of his fingers until they click.

(13:00) did you always know what you wanted to do with your life?

**(13:06) Since I was quite young, yes**

(13:06) and you’re doing it now?

**(13:07) I’m trying to. Architectural engineering. It’s difficult but I like it a lot**

(13:07) that’s really so cool

(13:07) can you build me a house?

(13:07) no a castle

(13:08) can you build me a castle somewhere?

**(13:08) No**

**(13:08) Maybe**

**(13:08) Where do you want it?**

(13:09) anywhere;; somewhere by water

(13:09) somewhere far away

(13:09) come with me?

**(13:11) Maybe**

**(13:13) What will you do for me?**

(13:13) anything you want

Baekhyun sighs, drops his phone onto the desk next to him from high enough that it clatters loudly but not dangerously. He thinks he’s definitely close to flirting and he can’t tell if Kyungsoo is aware of it or not. It feels as unreal as his studies, curriculum without practice, and he can’t take these texts seriously either. It’s like being fourteen and pretending you’re seventeen to mess around in chat rooms. But they’ll meet tomorrow and something will change. It doesn’t matter what. He has time for texts but he doesn’t have time for anything more. He’s already pushing it by going with Chanyeol at all. Maybe he should stay home. Maybe he should lock his door and board up his windows. Kyungsoo uses proper capitalisation in his texts, he’s probably going to hate Baekhyun anyway.

By the end of the day he’s hit bedrock on both of his assignments. He always does this, pours out his thoughts in random order, bullet points and no punctuation, and then he gets stuck. He distracts himself with the technical bits, titles in a sans serif font and a properly formatted reference list, the bits you’re supposed to do at the end when you actually have a completed report. He rearranges paragraphs even though half of them end in question marks and ellipses anyway. He types out every paragraph again like he won’t hit the same blank space in his brain and short out. He types out song lyrics like the physical act of typing will kick start him into critical thought. He does all of this and he’s still stuck and it’s terrifying because if studying until his teeth ache and his fingers bleed doesn’t help him then what will.

“Just... do it,” he mutters to himself. “Just write properly.” He rephrases a sentence. He italicises a journal title in his reference list. He glides his fingers across his keyboard without pressing any down, muting the words in his head. He spins around in his desk chair. His post-its still make no sense.

After dinner (something with sausage, Chanyeol’s final recipe), Baekhyun goes to the convenience store on the corner of their street. He needs more snacks, he’d finished off his apple candy in the morning and he is sure his brain needs sugar to work properly. He gets shrimp chips and a strawberry melona for himself and a mango one for Chanyeol and a bar of chocolate for Kyungsoo, the darkest he can find in their crappy corner shop. He’d said he liked dark chocolate the best and really Chanyeol should be buying it, because Chanyeol broke his door, but Baekhyun knows he won’t. He presses all the buttons in the elevator going back and gets off at every floor, jumping in and out of the lift until the doors start to close.

On Sunday Baekhyun doesn’t text Kyungsoo at all. He feels strange about the whole thing, about almost-flirting, about bringing him chocolate, about being called strawberry boy on his phone. Kyungsoo is going to hate him. Kyungsoo is going to be exactly as scary as Chanyeol says he is. Kyungsoo is going to be lovely and interesting and that’s the scariest thing he could be.

Chanyeol has, apparently, found someone stupid enough to lend him a car with a roof rack and it takes them thirty minutes to strap the door on top of it in a way that seems close to safe. They use an old guitar strap and rope from a tent they’d bought in first year because they thought camping sounded rugged and exciting but turned out to be boring and kind of difficult.

“It’ll work,” says Chanyeol, eyeing the swaying door dubiously.

“When we get arrested, you’re paying to get us out,” mutters Baekhyun.

But the drive is short and Chanyeol takes the corners at a crawl and only a couple of people sound their horns and Baekhyun sticks his head out the window to wave and smile prettily at all of them. Kyungsoo’s apartment block is another set of student flats, on the other side of the campus to theirs. It’s smaller and prettier and the lift is barely big enough for two people let alone a door.

“What floor is he on?” Baekhyun asks, quietly horrified.

“Tenth,” whispers Chanyeol, looking a little bit like his soul has left his body.

The stairwell is dark and cramped and impossible. It takes one flight for Baekhyun to decide it’s probably the worst thing he’s ever had to do. The door isn’t that heavy but it is unruly and awkward to carry.  They have to pivot the door around every corner, trying not to smash the corners into the wall, holding it above their shoulders at the places where the stairs are steepest. They are both dripping sweat after two flights and Baekhyun’s hands are blistered after four and his thighs are burning after six. They take a break.

“I’m never drinking again,” says Chanyeol.

“I’m going to start going to the gym,” vows Baekhyun, pushing his hair out of his face.

It takes them fifteen minutes to get to the tenth floor but it feels much longer. The tips of Baekhyun’s fingers are numb by the end. His t-shirt is plastered to his back and chest and his hair is a damp wave, rising high above his face, and he’s sure his face is shiny and red. Chanyeol kicks at the door to the apartment instead of knocking, so they only have to put their burden down once they’re properly inside. Baekhyun feels impossibly disgusting. He wants to ask Chanyeol if he can sit in the car and wait but Chanyeol might actually look a little bit worse than he does. He almost never looks bad but when he does, because there is so much of him, he seems to look especially bad.

“You look sexy,” Baekhyun croaks and Chanyeol actually lets go of one side of the door to make a rude gesture with his hand, almost sending both of them toppling over.

The apartment door opens and Baekhyun shuts his eyes. It’s a reflex, a thousand different fears and a thousand different ways to protect himself. He isn’t sure what he’s afraid of seeing but he shuts his eyes for a moment and Chanyeol laughs at him. But it’s Jongin who opens the door anyway, eyes smiling, sunshine as a person. Baekhyun is kind of scared of Jongin too, if he’s being honest, because he’s only ever met him at the performances he does with Chanyeol and the way he dances is quite intimidating. He’s open and raw and overtly sexual when he dances, not the teddy bear he seems in real life.

“Come in,” he says, covering his laugh with a hand, “I’ll get you water.”

They haul the door across the small living room, avoiding a coffee table and a couch, and then they’re through an open door frame with splintered hinges and Baekhyun sort of wants to laugh but his hands hurt too much. And then there is Kyungsoo, a wrapped parcel of a person, just as careful and neat and cute as he had been when Baekhyun had knocked him down and strewn his books across the quad. He drops the door and it thuds into the carpet and Chanyeol yelps. Baekhyun doesn’t really know what to do. Really, this is exactly the sort of ridiculousness he should expect from his life. Really, he deserves it.

“It’s you,” he manages, when the silence stretches to long. He shakes his hands out, trying to get circulation back to his fingers and trying to make himself feel less wobbly, and then he pulls at his hair to get it into some kind of order. Chanyeol is maneuvering the door so it’s leaning against the wall. Kyungsoo is staring at him. Kyungsoo who could punch you in the face with just his eyes. Kyungsoo with pretty eyes and pretty hands and a pretty mouth. He’s wearing fuzzy grey socks and his hair is soft and swooping across his forehead and he looks like he doesn’t sweat at all. Baekhyun tugs at the hem of his t-shirt.

“You’re... Baekhyun?” Kyungsoo is blinking quite rapidly but other than that there’s almost no sign that he’s surprised at all. He stops blinking and pushes his glasses a little further up his nose. He folds his hands together in front of him. Baekhyun can’t tell if they’re still hurt.

“You know each other?” Chanyeol looks more appropriately confused and still quite disgusting and Baekhyun has never been happier to have him there beside him.

“He... Kyungsoo is the person I almost killed the other day.”

“You didn’t almost kill me, you just knocked me over,” Kyungsoo corrects quietly.

“I made you bleed, you could have died.”

“I was barely even hurt.”

Chanyeol starts to laugh. He laughs with his whole body, leaning his hands on his knees and then draping himself around Baekhyun’s shoulders, so heavy Baekhyun’s knees buckle. Kyungsoo watches this with wide eyes and baekhyun doesn’t know what to do so he focusses on not letting Chanyeol pull them both to the ground. When he’s finally calm, Baekhyun disentangles himself from his friend. Kyungsoo keeps clasping his hands together and then unclasping them and sucking on his lower lip. It’s distracting. Baekhyun wishes he had long sleeves so he could pull them over his hands and pretend that meant he was hidden.

“This is like something from a drama. This definitely makes the stairs worth it,” says Chanyeol, breathlessly, after falling into Kyungsoo’s desk chair. “You said he was cute though and Kyungsoo is about as cute as a brick.”

“Rude, Chanyeol,” Baekhyun says, a little helplessly. Kyungsoo is staring at him again and his expression is unreadable.

“That’s what you think about after you hurt someone?” he asks, after a little bit too long of a pause. “How cute they are?”

“Of course,” Baekhyun grins shakily. “I only injure the cutest people.”

“Ah,” says Kyungsoo.

“Are you guys gonna kiss now? Oh my god, are you gonna-” Kyungsoo moves quicker than Baekhyun would have thought possible and he cuts Chanyeol off with a vicious set of fingers under his ribs. Chanyeol shrieks and bats his hand away, almost toppling from the chair, and Baekhyun laughs, only a little bit hysterically. _Of course Kyungsoo is the cute boy I hurt_ , he thinks feverishly, _of course he’s small and violent_. Of course, of course, of course.

“If you keep talking I’m going to lock you in my closet,” says Kyungsoo, and his expression is so deadly calm that Chanyeol actually looks a little afraid. Baekhyun is sure he could do it too, even though he’s only about three quarters of Chanyeol’s size.

Jongin appears then, a glass of water in each hand, and he looks warily from Kyungsoo to Chanyeol and then to Baekhyun.

“You should be nicer to them, Soo,” he says. Baekhyun takes the glass that’s offered to him and so does Chanyeol, getting to his feet.

“Jongin, let’s leave them alone,” he says, “so they can-”

“ _Chanyeol_ ,” Baekhyun cuts in and Chanyeol’s grin is a thousand miles wide and entirely unwelcome. They leave the room. Baekhyun rolls his glass between his palms, rocks backwards on his heels. Kyungsoo frowns at the carpet.

“Ah,” he says again.

“I’m sorry about your hands,” says Baekhyun.

“They’re fine,” he says, quietly, and after a moment’s hesitation he holds them out for Baekhyun to see. The scrapes are still there, dark red and scabbed over, but they’re smaller than he remembers, just patches of cross-hatched skin, mostly healed. Baekhyun reaches across the space between them but quickly remembers that they’ve only just met and pulls back before they touch. His skin probably feels a little bit like sandpaper. Kyungsoo drops his hands to his sides.

“This is...” Baekhyun laughs, nervously, “this is awkward.” Kyungsoo smiles a little. A _really_ pretty mouth, thinks Baekhyun. The shadow at the dip of his top lip is somehow completely perfect. He chews on the inside of his cheek.

“Would you help me with the door?” Kyungsoo asks.

Together, they manage to fit the door into it’s frame. Baekhyun tries to protest Kyungsoo using his hands but his expression turns flat and Baekhyun swallows his worries. Kyungsoo is fine with the door of course, and his hands are steady and strong. He rolls his sleeves up to the elbows and Baekhyun watches the folds of fabric instead of the fine hairs on his arms, his tan, the pale underside of his wrists. Baekhyun holds the door in place while Kyungsoo drills in the hinges and he has to stand on a chair to get the top one but that’s fine too. It’s easy. It’s far easier than it had been getting the door there in the first place. When they’re done they stare at it. Baekhyun sort of wants to clap his hands together and declare it a job well done, but he doesn’t.

“I got you chocolate,” he says instead, “but it’s in my pocket and I’m pretty sure it melted. I’m too scared to take it out.”

“Why?”

“Uh well... climbing the stairs with that door was kind of... I mean you see my hair? And-”

“No, why did you bring me chocolate?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Because Chanyeol didn’t and you said you liked chocolate so I...” he trails off into nothing, screws up his face, laughs. Everything inside him is a muddle. “Your room is really... clean. My room is... well it’s usually tidy but when I have assignments it’s kind of... Anyway, I’m going to go and get Chanyeol, he needs to apologise again.”

He bolts before Kyungsoo can say anything, out of the room and into Jongin’s room right next to it. Jongin and Chanyeol are sitting on his bed and both of them are relaxed and laughing and Baekhyun thinks he must look stiff as a board because they stare a him.

“What are you doing?” Chanyeol asks, looking so long suffering Baekhyun is a little offended.

“We fixed the door,” he says. “Come see.”

“Are you alright?” Jongin asks.

“Definitely not,” Chanyeol sighs. “He’s being a baby.” Jongin laughs and Baekhyun grabs Chanyeol’s hand and pulls him to his feet. He drags him back to Kyungsoo’s room and he doesn’t let go of him when they get there. He keeps their arms linked, their sides pressed together. Kyungsoo is sitting on his bed. He looks a little dazed, kind of like he had just after Baekhyun crashed into him.

“I can’t believe you shrimps managed to do this on your own,” Chanyeol says, pulling away from Baekhyun, running his hands up the side of the door, opening and closing it.

“I can’t believe you managed to break it in the first place,” Kyungsoo mutters, getting to his feet. “Where did you get the door? It’s the exact same kind I had before.”

“I talked to the apartment building’s property manager and she told me where to buy it.”

“You didn’t... you didn’t mention me, did you?”

“Nope, I charmed her though and she let me use her discount,” he laughs. “I fluttered my eyelashes.”

“Scary,” Baekhyun murmurs. He grabs hold of Chanyeol again, feeling sort of like if he lets him go he’ll fall down. He leans into him heavily and Chanyeol laughs, shakes him free of his arm, but only so he can hook his arm around his waist. Kyungsoo watches this, his expression so blank Baekhyun wouldn’t be surprised if he’d fallen asleep with his eyes open, but then he looks away, to the window. Baekhyun’s clothes are itchy and his skin is itchy and Kyungsoo’s hands are pretty.

“I don’t know how to talk to you now,” he says, still helpless. Next to him Chanyeol laughs. “How come I could do it before and now I can’t?”

“You’re the only person to ever make him speechless,” says Chanyeol. “It’s quite impressive.”

“You talk a lot for someone who is speechless,” says Kyungsoo, looking at Baekhyun, finally seeming a little bit ruffled, a little bit confused, chewing at the edge of his bottom lip. Baekhyun knows he has no reason to be feeling as wobbly as he does. All it is is a funny coincidence and he’s on the edges of hysteria. He needs to get back to his assignments. He needs to take advantage of the stupid rush of adrenaline this has given him and write ten thousand words and then sleep for fifteen hours and then do it again.”

“I have to go,” he says, hurriedly. “I have to... I have assignments.

“No, you don’t,” Chanyeol’s hand tightens at his waist. Kyungsoo presses his lips together, looks between Chanyeol and Baekhyun again, adjusts his glasses. His fingernails are bitten to the quick.

“Yes, I do,” he struggles free. Kyungsoo’s room is soft and light. There are too many pillows on his bed and there is a stack of library books on his desk but none of the frantic signs of study Baekhyun has in his room. No post-its, no duvet draped over his desk chair like he couldn’t sleep and took his bed to study with him. No empty cartons of strawberry milk, no rubbish bin full of melona wrappers. Baekhyun doesn’t fit here.

“Well, it was nice to meet you Baekhyun,” says Kyungsoo. He runs a hand through his hair, pushing it off his forehead, but it falls back into place straight away. “Next time you come here, don’t bring Chanyeol.”

“No way, I’ll be at all of your dates,” says Chanyeol, airily. “To protect my Baekhyun’s honour.”

“I really hate you,” Baekhyun sighs. His cheeks are burning. This is not how any of this was supposed to go. “Kyungsoo, you can kill him now if you like.”

“If he breaks any other parts of my room, I will.”

They say goodbye to Jongin and then leave. It’s obvious that Chanyeol wants to say something, he jumps from foot to foot in the tiny lift on the way down, but he restrains himself. Baekhyun doesn’t say anything. All he can think about is how comfortable Kyungsoo’s room felt, clean and tidy but still lived in. Even though Baekhyun’s pretty sure architectural engineering is mostly done with computers now, there had been pencil shavings in a neat pile on his desk and he’d had smudged hands when he’d knocked him over. Maybe he draws because he likes it. The chocolate in his pocket has melted but it hasn’t leaked which Baekhyun thinks is kind of a miracle. He throws it into a bin before they get into the car.

At the apartment he goes straight back to studying, the same routines he’s been going through for days. He gets twenty five extra words by rewriting one paragraph and it exhausts him so much he has to lie down. Everything that he’d said to Kyungsoo seems ridiculous now. He can’t fathom why he’d been so nervous just meeting someone new. He’s never nervous meeting new people. He _likes_ meeting new people. But Kyungsoo had blinked at him and he’d fallen apart. The worst part is that it hasn’t made him want to hide from him, it’s just made him want to try harder. Next time they meet he’ll be confident and cool and charismatic. Except that there can’t be a next time because Baekhyun has to study. He wrinkles his nose at his phone, enters in his passcode wrong five times so that it freezes him out for a minute and then watches it count down until he can use it again.

(18:22) i’m sorry i was so awkward, i got flustered, i’m not usually like that

**(18:22) It’s alright, I was the same**

**(18:22) What are you usually like?**

(18:23) charming and effervescent

(18:23) like a hundred times cuter

(18:23) like a thousand times less sweaty

**(18:24) Ah, I don’t think I would like you then**

(18:25) what does that mean ????

**(18:25) Haha, nothing**

**(18:25) I liked you fine today**

(18:27) just wait til you meet me properly

**(18:28) I’ve met you twice already, I can’t imagine you’re much different the third time**

(18:28) the first time didn’t count, you were dizzy from blood loss

(18:28) next time i’ll be perfect

**(18:29) I’ll look forward to it**

They’ve definitely crossed over into flirting. Baekhyun feels kind of like burying his face in his hands, kind of like laughing, kind of like throwing up. He wills himself to calmness and when it doesn’t work he rearranges his post-its again. It takes him thirty minutes but they make a haphazard kind of sense to him eventually and he feels less like he’s going to die. He wishes he could do things by halves, study and not study and flirt with someone cute and sleep a normal amount of hours every night and eat three meals a day.

“Everything is fine!” he yells to his ceiling, and he punches up with his fist, rolls off his bed, and goes to find Chanyeol.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah wow this ended up way longer than i anticipated. ok ok but they've met for real right? awkward as that might be.. thank you so much for reading, i hope you continue to like this everyone's comments and stuff are making me blush you are all the nicest :') this chapter is for lockyeol because idk how soon the next one will be >. >


	6. Chapter 6

Baekhyun meets Chanyeol when he is fifteen and just starting his fourth new school in less than a year. It seems the same as all the others, grey lino and hessian corkboards, and no one will talk to him properly here just like no one will talk to him properly anywhere. People skirt around his parents deaths like there is something sticking their teeth together, lockjaw or toffee or wire. His teachers are soft and nervous around him and they let him get away with anything and it only makes Baekhyun want to run even more, because adults aren’t supposed to be like that. They’re supposed to tell him what to do.

He finds Chanyeol on his third day while cutting class. He’s drifting through empty hallways, scuffing his shoes along the lino so he squeaks as he walks, humming under his breath to add to the noise. He wants someone to catch him, just to see the way their face changes when they realise who he is. He turns a corner and the hall isn’t empty anymore and he thinks _finally_ , but it’s just a student with his head bowed against the wall. Baekhyun recognises him as one of his classmates, stupidly tall and dopey looking Park Chanyeol. He remembers him because he’d been the only person in his class to smile at him in a way that might have been genuine, a thousand teeth and star-bright eyes. Still, Baekhyun means to avoid him and he is halfway turned around when Chanyeol starts to bang his head against the wall. Not hard, but slow and steady, solid thumps that are softened by the closeness of his body to the wall. Baekhyun turns back. His hair is shielding his face and his hands are loose fists at his side. Baekhyun feels a surge of sympathy for him, alone in a hallway and obviously frustrated, and without really meaning to he finds himself walking closer.

“Did it do something to offend you?” he asks. “The wall, I mean. Did it steal your girlfriend? Beat you at sports? Is it because it’s taller than you?” His voice echoes. Chanyeol stops banging his head, turns to watch Baekhyun through his hair as he talks. He has ridiculous hair, too long, falling all over his face, the remains of bleach at the ends. Baekhyun thinks he probably gets in trouble for it every day and wonders how he’s managed to get away with not cutting it.

“No girl would pick anyone over me,” he says, straightening, “I’m the tallest sentient being in the school.”

Baekhyun laughs. “Then why were you trying to give yourself brain damage?”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Alright.” Chanyeol steps away from the wall, moves closer, leans down, brings his palm up between their faces, curved like a shield.

“I’m going to be a musician,” he whispers. Baekhyun waits for him to say something more but he’s already pulling away. He looks nervous, his eyes are very wide and he seems to be trying to look everywhere at once. He’s smiling too, but it’s more like a tic than a real expression.

“Was the wall not impressed by this?” Baekhyun asks.

“Ah, no that was something else,” says Chanyeol, chewing on his lower lip. “That was because my parent’s don’t really want me to and- _oh_. I’m really sorry.”

“For having parents?” Baekhyun licks his lips. He’d thought Chanyeol had forgotten who he was and it had been nice, for a moment, talking to someone about nothing.

“No, I just mean... my parents don’t approve of my music but that’s... that’s... I mean you don’t even _have_ pare-”

“You don’t have to do that,” Baekhyun interrupts, “tiptoe around me, I mean. I’d much rather you talked to me like I was a...a sentient being.” He borrows the phrase awkwardly and he watches the thoughts move through Chanyeol’s head, an almost-frown and a twist of his lips, and he expects him to shut down after this, make awkward conversation about the weather or about homework or about how awful one teacher is or isn’t. But then he smiles again, a thousand teeth and star-bright eyes.

“I’m really happy I’ve told someone about the musician thing,” he says. “We’ll have to be friends now, Byun Baekhyun.”

He sits down on the dirty lino and then scoots back until he’s leaning against the wall. With his legs crossed he looks sort of like a grasshopper, all knees. He pats at the floor beside him and Baekhyun only hesitates for a moment before sitting down next to him.

“Why don’t your parents want you to be a musician? If we’re friends, I’ll try to fix it,” he says carefully. All he was wanted for so long is someone to talk to, someone with different problems to his own that he can help with. “What kind of music do you make?” Chanyeol’s smile is blinding.

They’re fast friends after that. Baekhyun can’t fix the way Chanyeol’s parents feel about his music but it was never his to fix and they do find middle ground somehow and Chanyeol is happy so Baekhyun is happy. Or at least he continues to exist, which had seemed an unlikely thing to him sometimes. His foster parents stop letting him do whatever he wants and start to treat him less like something they don’t know what to do with and more like someone they’re trying to figure out. His teachers get better too and Baekhyun stops skipping class quite so often. On some evenings Baekbeom even eats at the table instead of studying. They splutter and burn their way back into life.

University seems like a step back. There’s no one to tell him what to do again and he feels like he’s fourteen with dead parents, a get out of jail free card. Except that he’s not because if he fails here there’s no one to tell him it’s alright, they’ll let him off this time, he can have the qualification anyway, just for showing up. He wants someone to take one look at him and see that he’ll be good in the field, helping other kids come back to life, but no one looks at anyone for very long at university. Everyone is cut loose. He still has Chanyeol but their problems are a different sort now. Different to scuffed shoes in lino halls. And he thinks that Kyungsoo is a different kind of problem altogether.

“I think I’ve accidentally been flirting with Kyungsoo,” he tells Chanyeol, jumping onto his bed, stretching his arms up until he can almost, but not quite, touch the ceiling. Chanyeol spins in his desk chair.

“Was this before or after you discovered he was cute?”

“Both,” Baekhyun laughs, “but I thought I was just being... me.”

“Just your regular old overbearing Byun Baekhyun.”

“I’m too charming,” he explains, dropping onto his butt, bouncing in place a few times. “I’ve accidentally been too charming and adorable.”

“You don’t want to romance him then?”

“I don’t have time to romance anyone.”

“Pretend, for a second, that you are a person who has mastered time management,” Chanyeol splays his hands wide, shuts his eyes, like he’s seeing this beautiful reality on the back of his eyelids. “Would you want to romance him then?”

“It’s not about time management, it’s about-”

“Jongin told me he can cook and you definitely need someone who can cook,” Chanyeol opens his eyes. “I think you should marry him even though he’s scary. I’ll even give my blessing, if you promise me protection.”

“Thanks,” Baekhyun rolls his eyes. “I told you, it was accidental flirting.”

“You should still definitely ask him out.”

“I hardly know him.”

“A stranger is just a boyfriend you haven’t met yet.”

“That’s... that’s fucked up, honestly.”

“Okay, but today at his apartment you guys were really unbelievably awkward and I’m pretty sure that means it’s true love,” he grins. “Remember when I tried to kiss Jongdae tenderly on the forehead and he almost broke my jaw? This is the same thing, except you fucked his hands up and sweated all over his bedroom.”

“Why did I even come to you?”

“I have no idea. Aren’t you’re supposed to be the one who knows how to help people? Help yourself.”

“I don’t know how to help anyone,” Baekhyun mutters. “If I did I wouldn’t spend ninety percent of my time about to pass out from panic.”

“I think it’s more like seventy five percent,” Chanyeol smiles, leans back in his seat, stretches out his legs, a thousand feet long. “You know you don’t have to ever talk to him again, right?”

“Right...”

“But you could. You could get food with him or study with him, do something normal that doesn’t involve installing a door. You’re allowed to have a new friend.”

“A new friend...”

“Yeah, you flirt with your regular friends same as your uh... sex friends.”

“Maybe,” Baekhyun sighs. He gets up, ruffles Chanyeol’s hair, dodges the lazy swipe of his hand. “If I ever hear you say ‘sex friends’ again I’m divorcing you.”

Chanyeol’s right though, none of it needs to mean anything, it can just be flirting without consequence. Kyungsoo is pixels. Cute pixels. Pixels that make up maybe the best looking person he’s ever seen in real life, but still just pixels. They can definitely be friends. They can definitely study together. Maybe he really will be a good influence and Baekhyun really will study properly with him, in his room with pencils and cushions, and he’ll find that he is suddenly insightful and coherent. A model student. He sits at his desk and he reads through a whole chapter of a textbook without getting distracted and then he adds two hundred only semi-ridiculous words to one of his assignments. Maybe Kyungsoo’s magic is working already.

But then his stomach rumbles and he remembers he hasn’t eaten much that day except leftover shrimp chips and ramen and his hair is still greasy from dragging the door up the stairs and he’s chewed his lower lip to shreds and he hasn’t done laundry in two weeks and he’s almost out of underwear. He changes the names of his assignments using the proper naming conventions. ID number, course code, assignment number, year. He wants to have a shower but he’s suddenly scared of leaving the room. If Chanyeol hears his door open he might come out and ask him if he’s eaten and he can’t lie to Chanyeol. Then he’ll have to sit down and eat and that will take up his shower time and he’ll be too busy during the week so he’ll definitely be disgusting when he studies with Kyungsoo. Doing laundry involves leaving the apartment altogether so that’s completely out of the question. He pushes his thumbnail under the cuticle of the opposite thumb. At least his fingernails are always beautiful. He ignores his stomach and picks up his phone.

(21:13) do you want to study together tomorrow?

(21:13) after class i mean

(21:13) you can say no  
(21:13) your room seemed v studyable

(21:14) i dont mean i want to study it i mean it looks good as a place to study in

(21:14) ^^;;

**(21:15) Okay**

(21:15) okay!!

**(21:16) Come over any time after 2.30**

**(21:16) Bring the chocolate you owe me**

(21:17) im gonna bring you strawberry milk

**(21:18) You won’t make it through the door**

**(21:18) See you tomorrow**

(21:18) see you tomorrow kyungsoo~

Except then, of course, he’s waiting for it. It’s not a relief, something crossed off his list, it’s a thousand new things added. He squirms in his seat. He wants to go to Chanyeol again and ask him what to do. He wants to be someone who doesn’t need anyone to tell him what the right answer is. An adult, maybe.

“I _am_ an adult,” he tells the cursor blinking on his laptop, stuck halfway through a sentence.

In the end he has a shower but he doesn’t eat. He doesn’t want to feel more weighed down than he already is. He falls asleep close to three in the morning, his hair still damp, his stomach rolling queasily. He has around five hundred usable words for each assignment and more than five thousand words of nonsense. A mixture of too-long quotes and song lyrics and stream-of-consciousness rambling. He has until Friday. He’ll get most of it done in the hours leading up to the deadline and he’ll submit something that isn’t close to what he wants it to be and then he’ll sleep for thirty hours and start again.

His Monday classes are a blur. He makes sure there are empty seats surrounding him in the lecture halls because he still can’t stop moving and he knows it could be distracting to the other students. He has bungeoppang and bubble tea for breakfast and he buys ten different brands of dark chocolate because the campus convenience store is better than the one by the apartment. His brother sends him money on Mondays. He needs to get a job. He needs to finish his assignments and start the next ones and do his laundry and study with Kyungsoo and sleep and play games with Chanyeol and go to noraebang with Jongdae and call his family and get a job.

At Kyungsoo’s apartment he stops by the front door. He bought far too much chocolate, he has to keep most of it, it’s embarrassing. He holds his breath when he knocks. Kyungsoo is exactly the same as he has been every time they’ve met. His cuffs are buttoned and his hair is smooth. Baekhyun is reminded of still water.

“I’m sorry, there was no strawberry milk at the shop,” he says, sticking out his lower lip. Kyungsoo’s eyes narrow.

“Lucky for you,” he says.

They study in Kyungsoo’s room. Baekhyun sits on the floor under the window and Kyungsoo sits at his desk, across the room. Baekhyun thinks they could both fit at the desk, Jongin must have a chair he could borrow, but he doesn’t suggest it. They would be forced to touch, sitting at the desk, shoulders and hands. He taps his feet. He should have worn cuter socks. He sets his laptop and his textbooks on the ground next to him and then crawls, hands and knees, to the power outlet next to the desk, so he can plug his laptop in. It’s old and doesn’t hold battery very well. Kyungsoo watches him do this, he can feel it, and he kinds of wants to shake his butt just to see what he would do, but he doesn’t.

“We can study in the living room,” says Kyungsoo, “if you need a table.”

“It’s called a _lap_ top right?” Baekhyun grins. “Or I could share your seat.”

“You won’t fit.”

“You’re small, I think I could if we squish together, one thigh each.”

 _“You’re_ small and that’s definitely not going to happen.”

Baekhyun gets up, intending to prove to Kyungsoo that they could share the seat and not be unbearably uncomfortable, but then he remembers the chocolate and he grabs his bag instead. He empties it out onto Kyungsoo’s desk. Ten bars of chocolate and a hundred pens, half of which don’t work, and some Red Velvet post-its Chanyeol gave him and a small amount of loose change and five tubes of chapstick fall out. Kyungsoo startles but doesn’t yell, just pushes his chair out and stares at Baekhyun like he’s grown an extra head. Baekhyun regrets it instantly.

“Oh, I really...” he picks up a pen, “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Why are all your pens half eaten?”

“They taste good,” Baekhyun laughs. He sweeps the rest of it back into his bag, avoiding the chocolate. This wasn’t supposed to happen, he was supposed to give him _one_ chocolate bar, he made the decision to do that less than ten minutes ago. “The chocolate is for you. I didn’t... I didn’t know what you liked.”

Kyungsoo looks at him and then looks at the chocolate and then pulls himself back to the desk so he can inspect it more closely. Baekhyun retreats to his spot under the window and sits back down. His heart is racing. The titles of his textbooks seem like gibberish. He chews at his lower lip and then opens his laptop and the most recent journal article he’s been reading even though he really should be writing instead. He’s interrupted by something hitting him in the forehead, one of the blocks of chocolate. Kyungsoo’s expression is unreadable but he licks his lips and Baekhyun finds he cannot speak.

“It’s the worst one,” says Kyungsoo, “so you can have it.”

There are whole oceans between them, Baekhyun thinks, plucking at the carpet. Kyungsoo is practically in another country on the other side of the room. He unwraps the chocolate, breaks it into pieces, puts one in his mouth. Kyungsoo watches him, eyes narrowed like he’s waiting for it to poison him. When Baekhyun licks at the corner of his mouth, to get anything sweet he might have missed, he turns back to his computer. Baekhyun wants to yell, just so he’ll look back again. He stuffs the rest of the chocolate into his mouth all at once and the taste floods his senses and he almost chokes.

Baekhyun doesn’t stay where he is for long. Kyungsoo’s typing is steady and rhythmic and he can’t really stand to listen to it. He picks up his laptop, crosses the room, puts it down on Kyungsoo’s desk. Kyungsoo glances at it and then at him but doesn’t say anything. His fingers still on his keyboard. He has eaten one piece of one bar of chocolate and then wrapped it back up and the rest of them are stacked on top of each other next to his pencil holder. Baekhyun takes a breath, pushes at his shoulder gently.

“We can fit,” he says.

“No,” Kyungsoo shakes his head.

“Please?” Baekhyun flutters his eyelashes and Kyungsoo’s expression darkens. He stands up and for a moment Baekhyun thinks that Chanyeol’s dramatics have been right and he’s going to get scary, but he just leaves the room. Baekhyun steals a piece of the unwrapped chocolate. Kyungsoo comes back a moment later dragging a chair behind him. He pushes Baekhyun out of the way, small hands digging into his sides so he can’t help but move, and then he puts the chair in place beside his.

“I win,” says Baekhyun, unable to resist. “Give me more chocolate?”

“You get nothing,” mutters Kyungsoo, sitting back down. Baekhyun takes his seat and their knees knock together and their shoulders brush. Studying here was a terrible idea, he thinks.

“We’re supposed to study together,” he says, weakly. “I mean... _together_ , together. It just seemed... Chanyeol says you like studying, I thought you might help me be better at it too.”

“I don’t like studying.” Kyungsoo smiles and Baekhyun’s stomach drops. “I like drawing and I like designing, but that’s not really what my degree is about. I don’t like maths and statistics and all the other stuff I have to do.”

“How do you do it then?”

“I just do,” he shrugs and their shoulders press together more firmly, for a moment. “I look at it as a necessary step to getting qualified and then working.”

“That’s the goal, huh?”

“It will be different when it’s real.” Baekhyun stares at him. He has told himself the exact same thing a thousand times, but it’s never made it easier to finish an assignment.

“And that’s enough to make you do it?”

“I guess,” Kyungsoo shrugs again. Baekhyun takes a breath and holds it. “But just because it works for me doesn’t mean it will work for you.”

“I wish I knew what did work for me.”

“Whatever you do, studying should be secondary to eating and sleeping.”

“Did Chanyeol tell you I don’t do those things?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know who he was talking about at the time. He just said his roommate was... bad at looking after himself.”

Baekhyun laughs but really he sort of feels like crying. He picks up the chocolate bar and breaks off two more pieces. He gives one to Kyungsoo and it was so _stupid_ of him to come here, where he can do things just so they might touch. He’s too old for crushes. He’s too old to be rearranging his life for someone he thinks is good looking. It’s all Chanyeol’s fault.

But actually, it does get easier, sitting together like that. Kyungsoo starts typing again and when Baekhyun’s stopped trying to make sense of what’s on his screen he starts again too. Sometimes their elbows knock against each other and Baekhyun will grin at Kyungsoo then and Kyungsoo will roll his eyes and push a chocolate bar across the desk toward him. It should be awkward, they’re strangers, but there is something about Kyungsoo that is calming. It doesn’t exactly put Baekhyun at ease about his academic future or the way he always feels close to breaking but it does make it a little easier to concentrate. He writes so he can keep up with Kyungsoo.

They study for several hours like this. Kyungsoo brings them water and then, later, he drags Baekhyun into the living room to eat kimbap. It’s different to when Chanyeol makes Baekhyun eat. He doesn’t say much, just gives him a plate and turns to his own and Baekhyun finds there isn’t really room to protest. He just thanks Kyungsoo and eats. It worries him that he’s so comfortable doing this, that it should be so easy, to eat and study instead of crawling up the walls. Kyungsoo is supposed to be pixels.

“You don’t seem bad at studying at all,” he says, when Baekhyun is about to leave. “But I think you’re easily distracted.”

“This doesn’t count,” says Baekhyun. “This isn’t normal. You’re... I’m not usually like this.”

“You said that yesterday too,” Kyungsoo smiles. “When do I get to meet the real Baekhyun?”

“I don’t know if such a person exists.”

“I definitely don’t believe that.”

“I want.... I want to study with you again, but I shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Baekhyun laughs weakly. “I just shouldn’t. You said I’m easily distracted and... and you’re very distracting.”

Kyungsoo doesn’t reply, he just smiles, head cocked to one side, a small smile but a good one. Baekhyun looks away, zips up his backpack, shrugs it over his shoulders. If he thinks about it for even a moment he’ll start to see the cracks in his logic. He’s felt better about studying than he has in months, at Kyungsoo’s desk sharing chocolate, and he _is_ a distraction, but not a bad one. He doesn’t have time for this. He needs to do laundry and get a job. Or something. He needs to do a lot of things.

“Thank you for the food,” he says, his voice coming out weird and forced, “and for the...” he gestures at Kyungsoo vaguely and then stuffs his hands in his pockets. Kyungsoo is still smiling. Baekhyun swallows, nods, steals one of the remaining bars of chocolate from Kyungsoo’s desk, and heads back home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took a little longer because im in assignment hell. kinda like baekhyun except i survive on custard buns and pretzels. i hope to be quicker next time! thank you for reading !!


	7. Chapter 7

Baekhyun submits his assignments three minutes before midnight on their due date, just as he said he would. They feel hurried and sloppy and half-done, even after working on them for so long. If he’s being honest, he’s not sure he’ll do better than when he’d been perpetually drunk and wired. His assignments then were frantic and impassioned and got him average grades that he pulled down further with terrible exam results and forgotten tests. He hopes these will be better, they kind of have to be. He’s a better student now and he will be a better social worker soon and a better human being always.

It annoys him that the paragraphs he writes when he’s with Kyungsoo, three times over the past week, are better than anything he’s written in a long time. Clear and confident like he knows what he’s talking about, though he doesn’t. He tries not to think about it more than he has to. It’s a crush, that’s all, he’s had them before and he’ll have a thousand more within a year. Girl group crushes or fingers-smudged-with-pencil-lead crushes. It doesn’t matter, they’re all the same.

In high school his biggest crush is on Kim Haeun, a girl with a mouth made for smirking and shoelaces that won’t stay tied. She’s in the same class as he and Chanyeol and sometimes he taps her on the forehead with the eraser at the end of his pencil and she tosses her long hair and he is sure it must be love. She smells like frost on flowers. He whines to Chanyeol about her at every opportunity and Chanyeol, who is a veteran of kisses, tells him he doesn’t know a thing about love.

They go on a school trip to the beach one day and Baekhyun is angry with Chanyeol for something trivial and is poking around at the rock pools on his own and she appears out of nowhere, like aphrodite from the sea.

“You’re cute, Byun Baekhyun,” she says, bold as anything, looking down at him crouching on the rocks. The sun turns her eyes molten.

“Would you like a starfish?” he asks. There is a patch of wet at the hem of her skirt and sand clinging to her bare legs. She giggles. He stands up and puts a hand on her shoulder and kisses her, because school trips always feel a little bit outside of reality, and then a wave hits the rocks and sea spray falls over them and she shrieks and he laughs and they run back to the rest of the class, hand in hand.

After that he forgets why he had wanted to kiss her in the first place. They go back to school and she shows all the signs of wanting to kiss him again and he just can’t be bothered. The curl of her lips holds no magic anymore and neither do her shoelaces. Soon after, he falls in love with someone else and starts the whole thing over again. He wonders whether the same thing will happen if he kisses Kyungsoo.

“Do you think if I kiss Kyungsoo, I’ll go back to normal?” he asks Chanyeol, in his room again, on his bed again.

“You were never normal,” sighs Chanyeol, not looking away from his computer. “I think if you kiss Kyungsoo you’ll want to keep kissing Kyungsoo.”

“No, I mean like... when I kissed Kim Haeun in school and stopped liking her.”

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the kiss that did that, it was realising you liked guys.”

“Don’t be an asshole, I didn’t stop liking girls.”

“Whatever, the way you felt about kissing changed,” Chanyeol flaps a hand at him. “Look, I don’t know, you handed in your assignments right? So it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“I have other assignments, I have a test on Friday, I have-”

“But none of this has anything to do with Kyungsoo.”

“I think I have to kiss him.”

“Whatever you say, Baekhyunnie. Did you eat today?”

“I have to go,” he leaves the room.

“Seriously, did you eat anything yet?”

“I can’t hear you,” Baekhyun sings out, and he trots the last few steps to his room and locks the door behind him. Truthfully he hasn’t really been able to eat for the past couple of days, not since he turned in his essays, not much more than rice. He thinks his worries must have moved to his stomach and he feels them all under his ribs, a balloon full of everything he has ever been scared of. Eating makes it worse. Rice is okay, and water, but anything more than that makes his stomach cramp and his mouth dry out. He doesn’t understand why he should feel like this _after_ handing in his assignments. He thought he’d be relieved, but he just feels sick. Maybe it’s something to do with the years he still has left. How long can you last feeling like you’re going to explode until you really do? No, he’s being dramatic. This is nothing. He leaves his room.

“I’m stealing your leftovers,” he calls, more to confirm it to himself than to tell Chanyeol.

“I’m gonna have Jongdae pee in your closet,” Chanyeol yells back, but Baekhyun can tell he’s pleased.

He eats quickly, curry and rice made by Jongdae before he disappeared to the hospital at twilight. The thought of him doing anything disgusting in his closet reminds him that he still has to do laundry and he thinks he may as well do two real adult things in one night. Eating doesn't even make him feel sick, just full. Maybe he does it to himself; psychosomatic indigestion.

Afterwards, he rummages through his room, dragging socks out from under his bed and sorting through the pile of sweaters he uses as a cushion for his desk chair. Their building has a coin-operated laundry room on the ground floor. He steals change from Chanyeol but he has his own laundry powder and fabric softener because _he_ looks after his clothes. Sort of. Not like Chanyeol who wears the same tent-like black hoodie until it gets holes at the elbows and then buys another one. He drags his laundry basket to the lifts. He takes a bunch of articles he’d printed out a week before too, because he’ll stay down there while the machine runs.

The laundry is a room of bare concrete with washers and dryers lining the walls. He sort of likes it, sometimes, the damp skirting and the whirr of the machines. He likes singing there, the way his voice echoes. He likes sitting on the machines and knocking the heels of his shoes against the thin, hollow metal, the way it billows like it’s not an appliance at all, just a sheet of white. He hauls himself up on top of one and reads an article out loud, highlighting parts of it in neon pink as he goes.

When the washing cycle finishes he puts everything he can into the dryer. He has a rack that hangs out his bedroom window for wool and things with melty sort of fabrics but rain in the city at this time of year is unpredictable and he doesn’t have the reflexes to be pulling things inside at a moment's notice, even if he was home all the time. Wool should be dried flat anyway, to stop it stretching. He looks after his clothes because if he doesn’t he’ll have to buy new ones and he doesn’t like calling home unless he absolutely has to. He keeps ratty t-shirts and sweats to sleep in or lounge in until they’re so threadbare Chanyeol calls him indecent. 

When his clothes are halfway through the dryer cycle his phone rings, almost vibrating itself off the washer. It’s Kyungsoo, his little pokemon profile picture flashing angrily.

“Kyungsoo!” he answers and immediately he wants to take it back. He sounds too eager, a happy puppy. He should have left it ringing longer too or maybe not answered at all and called back a little later.

“Hi, Baekhyun,” Baekhyun wonders if he’s smiling. He hopes he’s smiling. “What are you doing? You sound like you’re in a factory.”

“Just laundry,” Baekhyun laughs, “the machines here are kind of ancient. What are you doing?”

“I wanted to... Can I come and... do laundry with you?”

“Do you have laundry?”

“No, I mean-”

“I know, it’s fine, come over.”

“Okay... okay, thank you.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, I’m just... I’m in a bad mood, I guess.”

“Ah, then you’ve called the right person. Come watch me do laundry and then we can watch terrible TV together.”

“I don’t like terrible TV.”

“You’re a liar, everyone likes terrible TV.”

He explains how to get to the laundry room and hangs up. He kicks up his heels, thumps them back down against the machine. He was going to go over practice questions for the text he has at the end of the week, but he supposes that can wait. He flips through his articles, the black and white without the pink, he checks the time left on the dryer. Kyungsoo doesn’t live far away, he’ll arrive before the cycle finishes. Maybe he should run to the convenience store, get chocolate and snacks for watching movies. Maybe he should run upstairs and change out of his sweatpants and zip-up hoodie and into something... what? Less comfortable? Something prettier? He runs his fingers through his hair, scratches sleep from his eyes.

Kyungsoo arrives a little later. He looks tired, he’s dressed less carefully than usual, in an oversized black sweatshirt and black jeans with faded knees and frayed cuffs. His hands are swallowed by the cuffs of his sweater, the tips of nail-bitten fingers peeking out. His hair is fluffy and Baekhyun presses his palms to the cool metal of the washing machine instead of reaching for him.

“Take a seat,” he says, kicking the machine next to him,  “if you can reach.”

When the drying finishes Baekhyun hops down, opens it up, tumbles everything back into his laundry basket. He breathes in the scent, itchy warmth, like going to bed in the winter with flannel sheets just made. He throws one of his sweaters at Kyungsoo, who catches it but looks confused.

“You gotta put your face in it,” explains Baekhyun, “and you’ll forget anything bad that has ever happened to you.” Kyungsoo rolls his eyes but after a moment’s hesitation he does as he’s told, burying his face in the fabric. Baekhyun wants to coo, he looks so cute, but he doesn’t think Kyungsoo will appreciate it so he turns back to his laundry. Kyungsoo throws the sweater back to him a moment later and Baekhyun adds it to the rest.

“Don’t you feel better?” Baekhyun asks.

“Yes, actually,” says Kyungsoo, absently, like half of him is somewhere else. “Can I carry something?”

“Nope, I’m very strong and manly.” He shrugs the basket up higher in his arms to prove his point. Kyungsoo just raises an eyebrow.

Upstairs, Baekhyun puts his laundry in his room. Chanyeol comes out and talks to Kyungsoo while he does it and they don’t look like they hate each other nearly enough, though Chanyeol does reflexively step back whenever he says anything, like he’s worried he’ll be hit. Baekhyun sort of wants to split them up, send Chanyeol to his room, but then he thinks that maybe Kyungsoo had come here thinking that Chanyeol would cure his bad mood. Chanyeol is kind of infectious like that. He goes over to them, steals Chanyeol’s cap and pulls it down low over his eyes.

“Ah, Baekhyun wants you back,” says Chanyeol, a smile in his voice. “He’s yours, don’t worry.”

“Don’t say weird stuff to Kyungsoo,” Baekhyun pouts.

“I’m not anyones,” says Kyungsoo.

“I should make you food,” murmurs Baekhyun, tugging on the brim of the cap. Chanyeol steals it back. “Are you hungry?”

“He’s going to kill you,” says Chanyeol, on his way back to his room, “he’s never cooked in his life.”

“I can cook,” he protests. “I can cook ramyun, I can... boil eggs.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” says Kyungsoo, “I already ate anyway.”

“Lucky for you,” Chanyeol calls back. Baekhyun crosses the room to shut his door.

They sit on the floor together and go through the shelf that holds Chanyeol’s DVD collection. Baekhyun thinks that DVDs are kind of irrelevant now, but some of them have pretty covers so he sort of understands why Chanyeol keeps them. He taps at the spines of things he likes and sometimes Kyungsoo pulls one out to look at the blurb and then returns it, pressing it back with an index finger until it’s properly flush against the others. Nothing catches Baekhyun’s attention, he’s seen them all too many times or they’re not the right sort of thing for someone who is in a bad mood. It’s a delicate thing, choosing something to watch with someone who is sad or angry or generally displeased. He would like to pick something that made Kyungsoo feel better. He feels defeated.

“What do you _like_?” he asks, giving up, falling backwards so that he’s lying on the floor, hand pressed to his forehead. Kyungsoo draws his knees up to his chest, hugs his legs.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “I like... sports anime.” Baekhyun squints at him.

“Haikyuu?”

“No.”

“Prince of Tennis?” Kyungsoo laughs and he knows he’s right. “I don’t want to watch that, though.”

“No, tonight is a night for romance.”

“You have to watch horror movies with Baekhyunnie,” says Chanyeol, out of nowhere, startling them both, “they’re the only thing he can sit still through.”

“I could watch a horror movie,” says Kyungsoo.

So they pick something scary. Baekhyun actually loves horror movies, because they make him feel normal about the way he feels all the time, like his rapid heart rate and the pins and needles under his skin are okay when he’s watching a scary movie, because everyone feels like that. It’s almost a relief, to be able to fall into his anxiety like that. He relishes his clammy palms, his bitten lip, the half-moon creases his fingernails leave on his hands. No one questions these things when you’re scared. Besides, watching a horror movie is something he as control over, a deliberate sort of anxiety, so different from his every day.

He makes popcorn while Kyungsoo fiddles with the DVD player and he thinks, briefly, of hands meeting in the bowl, butter-fingers touching. He laughs. He thinks, too, of the light turned off in his room, his laptop closed, his textbooks closed, his highlighters capped. He dashes across the room and closes the bedroom door too, so he can pretend it doesn’t exist for awhile.

The movie starts, something sparse and pretty and wild. They sit on the couch together, the bowl of popcorn between them and Chanyeol only stays long enough to steal an enormous handful, before disappearing back to his room. Baekhyun thinks that if they were in fiction, this would be _the_ scene. One of them would get too scared and the other would be a comfort. They’d hold hands. Baekhyun thinks it would have to be him who was scared, who threw himself at Kyungsoo, buried his face in his neck, but he doesn’t. Not because he’s not scared but because it’s too stupid. And because Kyungsoo had come here because he was in a bad mood and that could mean any number of things and Baekhyun’s not going to add to the mix. They watch the movie like normal people watch movies. Like friends watch movies. Baekhyun covers his mouth with one hand, so Kyungsoo doesn’t hear him squeaking or swearing, and his eyes with his other hand, so he’s just peeking out between a gap in his fingers. He covers his ears in the worst bits because he’s sure at least ninety percent of the scariness is in the score. He listens to his own heartbeat instead. He likes horror movies, but he’s not good at watching them. He does keep still, but it’s the rigidness of terror, like if he moves the monster will eat him. Kyungsoo doesn’t, he jolts in fright at every jump scare and then he laughs quietly at himself for jumping. It’s cute. It’s almost cute enough to distract Baekhyun from being scared.

Three quarters of the way through, when everything is building up to an unbearable degree, Chanyeol appears again. He pops up from behind the couch, yelling something incoherent, and Baekhyun screams and Kyungsoo flies to his feet and chases him back to his room, hands balled into fists.

“Strong and manly, Byun Baekhyun,” Baekhyun mutters to himself, trying to breathe through his heartbeat, while Kyungsoo is busy probably murdering Chanyeol. He hopes Chanyeol’s screams hurt his throat as much as his have.

When Kyungsoo comes back and they settle into normalcy, Baekhyun finds he can’t keep still anymore. The movie’s tension is broken and his heart is still beating so fast he presses his palm to his chest to feel it. They watch the rest but it’s not the same. It doesn’t seem scary anymore, just overly serious and superficial. Kyungsoo doesn’t jump and Baekhyun doesn’t cover his ears. He watches Kyungsoo out of the corner of his eyes, his long eyelashes, the way  he sucks his lower lip into his mouth sometimes, the dark and soft of his jaw. He bounces in his seat. He wants to stretch out sideways, dig his feet into Kyungsoo’s thigh until he protests, wriggles away. Maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he would allow it. He pulls his knees to his chest instead and chews on the string of his hoodie.

When the movie ends they stay sitting in the dark. Baekhyun swaps his hoodie string for the popcorn kernels that didn’t pop and he sucks on them until they get gritty and soft under his tongue.

“I’m going to have nightmares,” he declares, stretching his arms up until his shoulders pop.

“About Chanyeol?”

“Exactly,” he grins. “About his ears.”

“About his teeth.”

“Would you like to stay here tonight?” With the television off, Kyungsoo is almost entirely in shadow, but Baekhyun can see his eyes close, the darkness of his lashes falling to his cheeks. “Because it’s dark, I mean.”

“It’s not far,” Kyungsoo turns to him and he’s smiling, “I’m not scared of monsters.”

“No, I mean, stay here to protect me,” Baekhyun flutters his eyelashes and Kyungsoo laughs.

“I think you’ll survive.”

Baekhyun gets up to turn on the lights and Kyungsoo stands and stretches. He pushes up his sleeves but they just fall down again so he folds the cuffs instead. Baekhyun is happy to see that he looks more relaxed than he had before the movie. His shoulders aren’t so tight and his mouth is softer too. Maybe he gets the same things from silence that Baekhyun gets from talking, a release of tension. Baekhyun shouldn’t notice these things. He tugs at the strings of his hoodie until it closes over his face and then he laughs at pulls it open again. Kyungsoo is still smiling.

“Are you going to Jongdae’s party?” he asks.

“You know Jongdae? Do you know _everyone_? Where did you even come from? Why didn’t I meet you before? Ah, I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t tell me about his parties anymore,” Baekhyun shrugs, “because I never go. When is it?”

“Friday.”

“So you’re free then.”

“Not exactly free,” Baekhyun says carefully. His next assignments aren’t due for almost a month but one party might turn into ten. It had all throughout first year. He pulls himself up onto his toes, makes small, tight steps, a clumsy pirouette.

“You should come,” says Kyungsoo. “I’ll make you a cocktail with strawberries.”

“Well,” Baekhyun looks at his feet, scuffs his socks across the carpet, “I guess I have to come then.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“Maybe, I _might_ come, it depends how much you want me there,” he teases, pulling confidence out of the air. “I’ll come to the party if you buy me food. No, I’ll come if you beg me to.”

“Actually, I don’t want you there,” Kyungsoo wrinkles his nose and Baekhyun laughs.  

He leaves and Baekhyun feels as strange as he does every time they part ways. He rinses the popcorn bowl and then he goes to his room and sorts through his laundry, folding and hanging everything that needs it. He studies after that, because he can’t think about sleeping. Even without assignments due he can find something to read, some piece of knowledge he won’t retain to read over and over again until it stops making sense. He can hear music coming through the wall from Chanyeol’s bedroom, the tumbling of piano keys and Chanyeol’s voice, slow and low. He doesn’t have time for any of this. He especially doesn’t have time for Kyungsoo smiling at him and for picking out his features in a dark room. Maybe he will go to Jongdae’s party. Maybe he’ll go and get drunk and kiss Kyungsoo to cure him of his crush. It worked in high school. Maybe. Sort of. It did something in high school. He’s kissed a lot of people since then for a lot of different reasons.

He swaps studying for youtube close to midnight, digging himself deep into second generation K-pop and then cryptids and then LOL streams. It’s not studying or sleeping and all of it is threaded through with guilt. He spent most of his first year of uni dizzy with freedom and this year he feels dizzy too. Like he’ll never get his balance back.

(02:13) ill come to the party if you stay with me

**(02:13) I changed my mind, you're not invited**

(02:14) why are you awake????

(02:14) im pretty sure only jongdae can invite and uninvite people to his parties so

(02:14) see you there geo-soo

**(02:15) I don't think I'll go anymore**

**(02:15) I’m awake because I had a nightmare**

(02:15) really????? :( :(

(02:15) im sorry

**(02:16) No, not really**

**(02:17) Why are you awake?**

(02:18) the ayia napa sea monster

**(02:19) Of course**

(02:19) im gonna sleep now though idk why you’re always keeping me awake

(02:19) it’s annoying

**(02:20) You’re annoying**

**(02:20) Good night**

(02:20) good night!!!!

(02:20) sweet dreams~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you thank you always for reading it's really so nice. thank you especially to the people who have found it easy to relate to bbh's anxiety, i'm so happy i could write something that feels familiar to you and i hope you have things that make you feel better, like bbh and horror movies or bbh and kyungsoo :3


	8. Chapter 8

Baekhyun starts at university bright eyed and eager because the city is new and the buildings are new and the lecture theatres are new. He is one in one thousand, elbows tucked in, taking pages of notes and cringing at the bad jokes the lecturers tell. Occasionally they also tell him things he hasn’t figured out himself, which is strange because sometimes he feels like his life has been longer than its years. Young and ancient at nineteen.

He gets distracted by the people, making friends with everyone and no one, because he’d had Chanyeol in high school and other kids laughed at the stupid stuff he did in class but they'd never really been his friends. He isn’t good without people, he needs to be wrapped up in them to feel real, but he finds it hard to trust that they won't leave. In his first semester he loves everyone he meets and he loves class and he goes to parties and he loves them too. But the lecturers start telling him things he already knows and things he doesn’t really care about and things that he can’t reconcile with the tearaway kid he’d been or the sort of kids he wants to help. He goes to more parties, he meets more people. It’s not that they’re the enemy either, drinking or people, it’s just that he can’t do things by halves and once his attention is lost it’s hard to get it back. His reasons for wanting to be a social worker are all based in feeling and university definitely isn’t. He starts to disagree with a lot the lecturers say but isn’t eloquent enough to argue it in an assignment. He misses classes and tests. He goes to the end of semester exams and he really tries to write something coherent but he bombs at them as well. He doesn’t fail, not quite, but his partial scholarship is dependent on him keeping a B average and he falls well below that and loses it.

Baekbeom is the first person he thinks of when he gets the bill for his second semester of classes. He wants to call him but just as quickly he realises he can't. He only finished his own degree a year ago and he’s working now and doing his Masters and then he’ll have to enlist. It’s too much. He gives Baekhyun a small allowance already, somehow, and Baekhyun can’t ask him for more. His brother is often distant and always busy but he always picks up his phone. Baekhyun calls his parents in Busan instead and they are soft and understanding and so lovely he can’t bear it. They cover his fees and his board. They tell him they saved the money anyway, the scholarship had just been a bonus, and he vows he will do better.

But second semester is more of the same. Halfway through he loses track of days, of people, of himself, and the friends he made in his first semester quickly disappear. Chanyeol doesn't. Chanyeol who found a boyfriend as soon as uni started, handsome and lovely, but is still there where Baekhyun needs it. It's still hard and it’s still lonely, but Chanyeol and Jongdae make sure he knows they're there. He loves them both and is still lonely. He has a C average by the end of his second semester and he’s stopped leaving the house entirely and he’s not good without people but it feels necessary now. He almost never calls home because if he does and they ask him how he is he won’t be able to lie.

In the days leading up to his test and the party afterwards, Baekhyun doesn’t see Kyungsoo at all. They text every day but Baekhyun is sure that if he goes to see him he’ll fail. A punishment for his crimes. He supposes he’s lucky Kyungsoo doesn’t ask to come over again, because he doesn’t think he could say no. He’s kind of scared of going to the party too, even though he’ll have friends there. On Thursday night he decides he probably shouldn’t go at all. No, he definitely won’t go, he can’t possibly. He wants to call Baekbeom. He wants to call his parents. He does half-hearted exercise in his room instead, because he’s studied late but he still can’t sleep. He tries to tire his brain out with a yoga video he finds on youtube but it mostly just ties him in more knots.

On Friday he wakes up tired and stays tired. He has no classes so he stays home, pacing his room, rearranging the post-its on his wall even though none of them make sense to him at all anymore. For breakfast he eats fruit and the acid sits in his stomach sharply. He tries to dull it with rice but that just makes him more uncomfortable. It’s hot so he opens the windows and lies on his bed, counting the shades of grey in the shadows on the wall. In the early afternoon, Kyungsoo texts him.

**  
(15:43) Good luck on your test**

**(15:43) I’ll see you later  
**   


He ignores it, starts gathering the things he’ll need for the test, even though it’s not for a couple of hours yet. His favourite pencil case, the Little Prince, pale blue and star-gold, and more pens and pencils than he will ever need. His skin feels stretched thin. What is he studying toward again? Why does he want to be a social worker? He never should have pretended he could do this.

At uni the exam room is everything an exam room always is; the smell of pencils and the desks in rows and backpacks sat at the front of the room. It makes him feel young. University is the same as high school right? So why can’t he do it? He sits down, places his pencil case in front of him, stares at the test booklet. The monitor starts the clock and he turns the paper over. It’s a series of long-form answers, a paragraph about social work and disability, half a page on orphans in foster care. Just looking at it makes his breathing thick and choked. He can't write about himself. He looks away from the questions to he end of his pencil. It looks strange against the paper, like ash, like gritty black charcoal. He presses it down until the lead splinters and then he presses down harder and it snaps right off and rolls across the page. He unzips his pencil case, pulls out his pencil sharpener, sharpens it, presses the new point to his finger. It’s still not sharp enough so he tries again. He doesn’t even need a pencil, it’s not a fill-the-dots test. He puts it all away and pulls out a pen instead.

Somehow the test is half over already and he hasn’t written a single thing. He goes over his name at the top of the paper until the words look swollen and angry. He draws flowers and hearts and blinking eyes in the margins. He sort of wants to write that he’s sorry, so the person marking it will know he doesn’t mean to be like this, he can’t help it. He wonders what sort of cocktail Kyungsoo will make him, what strawberry thing. He watches the clock, watches other students. They look like he’s supposed to look, brows furrowed, pens moving swiftly across the page. The worst part is that he knows the answers, he _studied,_ but he can’t remember anything. There is a roaring in his head where properly researched academia should be. He finds a loose thread at his cuff and tugs at it until it gathers up the fabric and then snaps, leaving behind a looser cuff that hangs baggy at his wrist. There is a fly in the room and it glides in loops near the air vents. There are droplets of water on the windows, lines of rain.

“Pens down please,” says the monitor, and a sigh of relief ripples through the room. Baekhyun’s knees feel wobbly and of course he knows exactly what he should have written now that the test is over. It comes back to him, clear and bright. He forces it from his head, gets his backpack from the front, leaves the room with his lips pressed together tightly, scared he might start laughing or crying or reciting the answers he didn’t write.

It had been a late test and he crosses the quad in twilight. Chanyeol will be at Jongdae’s already, pretending to help set up whatever needs setting up, though there’s never much. Jongdae’s parties are always full of med students who all know how to get drunk very efficiently and then sober again just as fast. They don’t have time for extras like snacks or mixers. They need clear white intoxication. Baekhyun thinks they must be robots, to be that way, and it’s entirely likely they don’t sleep at all. He wishes he could find a way to exist like that.

At his apartment he contemplates his laundry again. He needs an outfit that looks nice but not like he spent an hour picking it, even though he definitely will. It needs to look deliberate, but not contrived. Before, he would usually wear something slick and smooth, smudged eyeliner and crooked buttons, but he can hardly bring himself to make the effort now. He hasn’t worn makeup in a long time. He misses it, the routine it gave him calmed him down sometimes, lessened his anxiety. He opens and shuts his closet door.

“It doesn’t _matter_ ,” he tells himself, but that’s definitely not true. He isn’t going to the party anyway. He can’t believe he sat in that room for a whole hour and only wrote his name.

He ends up picking soft grey wool and blue jeans, far too hot for the weather, but he doesn’t care. It’s not really a party outfit but he doesn’t care about that either, he wants something that can envelop his hands when he feels worst, and he’s pretty sure this sweater was Chanyeol’s until he shrunk it in the wash. It’s still approximately elephant-sized. If he drinks he knows he’ll be uncomfortably warm uncomfortably quickly but maybe he deserves discomfort. He flips his phone over and over in his hand.

**  
(20:14) You should come before Jongdae drinks everything himself**

**(20:32) You should come before I kill Chanyeol for eating all my strawberries**

**(20:51) I’ll make you something without them**

  
He leaves late, after nine. Looking at Kyungsoo’s texts makes him feel a little sick. He's not sure he's ever met the sort of person who would take strawberries to someone elses party, just to make a drink. He catches the bus to Jongdae’s, a short bus ride but one he’s grateful for. He rests his cheek on the cool glass window and traces the names scratched into the back of the seat in front of him with an index finger; favourite groups and first loves. He tries to remember being young enough to do that, because he’s sure he did, he’s sure he scratched a thousand names into desks and scribbled them on binders and kissed them at night for good luck. Maybe if he’d done that he would have been able to take his test properly. He hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast but he isn’t hungry. There is a dull ache in his stomach, a hollow feeling, like a stone sinking down into still, dark water.

Jongdae’s place is different to most student accommodation. He’s the only person Baekhyun knows who has managed to find a whole house to live in. He has a rotating roster of flatmates, mostly people training to be doctors or to be a nurse like he is. People with similarly haphazard schedules. Baekhyun imagines you might live there without ever seeing your flatmates. Yixing from China who is impossibly sweet but whose drunk dancing is close to indecent. Junmyeon who is going to be the best GP on the planet but only if he survives the landfill of his bedroom. It's entirely possibly both of them have vanished into the ether.

The front door is unlocked and he opens it to music and people and dirty gold light. Baekhyun doesn't know anyone in the front room. There is a girl with hair like fire, spinning on her toes, bottle hanging from the tips of her fingers, a second from falling. There is a boy hanging out the window, smoking, his jeans hanging low on his hips. Baekhyun doesn't know anyone, but he knows the feeling of walking into a room like this so well he doesn't feel alone. Still, he needs to find Jongdae. He heads toward the kitchen, because that’s where he always is, dragging his palm along the walls. Chanyeol finds him on the way and slings an arm around his shoulders, almost pulling him to the floor.

“Your Kyungsoo was looking for you earlier,” he says, leering, tongue sticking out between his teeth.

“Stop saying he’s mine,” protests Baekhyun, pushing him off. “Where’s your Jongdae?”

"He made punch,” says Chanyeol gravely. “I fear for the lives of our friends.”

“That’s exactly why I want him," Baekhyun laughs. They reach the kitchen and Jongdae is there, just as he should be, and Chanyeol tickles him and then licks his cheek and Jongdae wails and Chanyeol disappears again.

“He’s disgusting,” pouts Jongdae, rubbing feverishly at his cheek with the back of his hand.

“He said you made punch.”

“You said you’d never drink my punch again.”

“That doesn’t sound like me at all,” Baekhyun smiles winningly but Jongdae still looks dubious so he flutters his eyelashes and smiles even wider.

“It's in the living room,” says Jongdae, after a moment. “Chanyeol isn’t drinking tonight, I’ll tell him that you are.”

“I’m not a child.”

“No, but you haven’t been properly drunk in awhile.”

“Whatever, thank you kitten.”

“Don’t call me that, puppy. There’s a room for you upstairs if you need it.”

Baekhyun goes off in search of punch. He can’t think of Kyungsoo. Knowing that he’s in the building somewhere is kind of exhilarating, terrifying, comforting. He needs to kiss him. He needs to kiss him to fix his life. Maybe if he kisses him he’ll be able to retake the test.

The punch is neon green and Baekhyun recognises it as what Jongdae calls ‘Mt Chamisul’ because it’s mostly mountain dew and soju, though there is also sometimes vodka involved and whatever sort of juice Jongdae has on hand. It’s typically disgusting. He fills a cup and downs it quickly and it burns so much his eyes water. He fills the cup again, turns to survey the room. There are people he vaguely recognises and people he doesn’t know at all. He hums along to the music, something else he doesn’t recognise. He chews on the rim of his plastic cup. Everything in the room is grey, he thinks it always is at parties, greyed out rooms and sticky skin and realising just how drunk you are only when you go to pee. He checks his phone.  
  
  
**(21:36) Jongdae says you’re here?**

  
He drains his second cup and fills it a third time and then heads back the way he came. It’s too hot, his cheeks are warm already and his sweater itches at his wrists. He can’t remember what he’s wearing underneath. In the hallway, Yixing appears out of nowhere, all dimples and ripped jeans that Baekhyun knows aren’t for glamour, he’s just clumsy with his clothes. His hair is different but the dark circles under his eyes are the same.  
  
“Baekhyun," he says, happy and smiling, touching Baekhyun’s arm, “I’ve missed you.”  
  
“I missed you too,” says Baekhyun, truthfully. Jongdae’s friends had not forgotten him, even when he disappeared. Yixing is quiet and intense sometimes and almost always working himself too hard, but there’s something about him that makes conversation easy and soft. They had never seen each other regularly but Yixing had texted him for almost a month after he stopped going to parties, even though he never replied.

“I like your sweater,” he pulls at one of the cuffs. “You know I have another sweater I think is yours in my bedroom, I don’t know how I got it. It has a... do you know the spiky plants? It has a spiky plant on the front.”

“A cactus?” Baekhyun laughs. He has missed the patchwork way Yixing speaks Korean too.

“A cactus," hums Yixing. "Find me later and I’ll give it to you.” He waves and turns and continues on his way. Baekhyun gulps down more of his drink. He can feel it in his veins already, like his blood is carbonating.

He finds Kyungsoo in one of the open bedrooms downstairs, sitting on the arm of a couch, talking with Jongin next to him. Baekhyun almost turns on his heel immediately, his heart jumps to his throat so hard, but Kyungsoo sees him and holds him in place with his eyes so he makes his way over. He stands up when Baekhyun gets close and that makes him want to bolt a little more. His hair is pushed back, away from his face, and his t-shirt fits him perfectly. These small things shouldn’t seem like much but they make him look almost impossibly good and Baekhyun chews on the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t tell him so.

“Did you get lost?” Kyungsoo asks. “How was your test?”

“Um,” says Baekhyun. “Did you try the punch? It’s disgusting, I’m in love.”

“I think Jongdae just made that so he’d have patients to experiment on,” says Jongin, smiling gently. The girl from earlier, with the bottle and the hair, is next to him on the couch, leaning against his shoulder. 

“He’s going to steal your organs,” Kyungsoo agrees. He’s watching Baekhyun with an expression so steady it turns his insides to jelly.

“Ah, well someone didn’t make me a promised strawberry cocktail, so I had no choice,” he sighs mournfully, finishes his drink, and Jongin laughs.

“I’ll make you something else,” says Kyungsoo. He walks passed him, snagging the baggy sleeve of his sweater as he goes. Baekhyun only has time to wave at Jongin before he’s being dragged away. He lets go when he’s following properly and Baekhyun kind of wants to stumble, just to see if he’ll take his arm. His hand. He crumples his plastic cup in his hand, places it on top of a bookshelf as they pass it.

Jongdae is no longer in the kitchen but Kyungsoo seems to know where everything is. He has things hidden in cupboards and behind stacks of dishes and in the far reaches of the fridge. He has a cocktail shaker. Baekhyun watches, slightly awed, as he pours crushed ice and mint and several different liquids into it, jams the two pieces together, shakes it up. It’s unfair, it shouldn’t be happening, Baekhyun needs more alcohol just to watch this. His hands damp, his arms bare.

“I only know how to make mojitos,” he says, pouring everything into a tall glass, magicked from nowhere. “But I was going to add strawberries.” He hands it to Baekhyun and the tips of their fingers touch of course and Baekhyun takes a sip. It tastes fresh and clean and delicious.

“Not strong enough,” he sighs, wrinkling his nose, sticking out his tongue.

“I didn’t know you had a taste for Jongdae’s ethanol punch.”

“I think it has a taste for me.” Baekhyun licks his lips, pulls a face, and Kyungsoo laughs, a real laugh, a good one, heart shaped mouth and pushed up cheeks and eyes smiling. It makes Baekhyun feel off balance, that he should make him laugh like that. It makes him happy. Not doing the test has cost him twenty percent of his grade. He bites at the rim of his glass, forgetting it’s not plastic, and the sudden cold makes him shiver.

For awhile they share a couch with a person that neither of them know. It’s a tight fit but Baekhyun really doesn’t mind being pressed up against Kyungsoo. He wishes he had taken off his sweater first, he thinks he would kill someone to have their bare arms touching, or maybe it would kill him. But it would be too awkward struggling out of it now that they're sitting and he is reluctant to move. He has his half empty mojito in one hand and a newly filled plastic cup of punch in the other and he alternates mouthfuls of each. His head is swimming. He thinks he must have been here for hours already but he can still count the number of drinks he’s had on one hand. Just. He leans his head against Kyungsoo’s shoulder, holding his breath.

“Why were you sad the other day?” he asks, putting one cup between his knees so he can hold his hand out above them, fingers splayed. Someone has decorated the room in fairy lights and he shuts one eye so he can pretend he’s pinching them out. Kyungsoo makes a low humming sound.

“I wasn’t sad,” he says, after a pause, “I just had a bad day.”

“Come see me every time you have a bad day,” says Baekhyun, “and I’ll do laundry for you.”

“Thank you,” Kyungsoo laughs, “I will.”

They talk about nothing for awhile, about anything other than uni. Kyungsoo has been trying to draw lately, things that aren't buildings, things like like hands and water and flowers. Baekhyun looks at his hands, holding a glass, resting on his thigh, the square tips of his fingers, the ragged edges of his bitten fingernails. Baekhyun thinks that he would like to draw his hands too. Maybe he should quit uni to become an artist, dedicated to Do Kyungsoo’s hands. It’s a stupid thought. All he can draw are happy daisies and cute hearts. He rubs at his eyes and shakes his head clear of it. Then Kyungsoo plucks at his sleeve and his head is full again.

“Aren’t you hot?” he asks. Baekhyun burns.

“Are you trying to get my clothes off?” he laughs. “So inappropriate.” Kyungsoo hits him, a small fist against his thigh. Baekhyun _burns_.  

They traipse around the party together after that, to get Baekhyun more punch and Kyungsoo more whatever-he’s-drinking. Soju and something. He drinks better than Baekhyun, he seems mostly the same as usual but with sleepier eyes and pinker cheeks and looser shoulders. At some point Yixing pulls Baekhyun into dancing and he almost loses it a little because Yixing dances like he has complete control of every muscle in his body and all of them want to fuck and Baekhyun dances in whatever way feels right, which mostly involves jumping and laughing and poorly executed hip thrusts. Together, they take over the room. There are fairy lights in Baekhyun’s head and an unbalanced sort of static and he thinks that if he stops dancing he will die. Yixing is laughing, falling out of the music, leaning on Baekhyun heavily. Kyungsoo won't dance, but he watches, leaning against the wall with Chanyeol who has appeared out of nowhere again. Chanyeol’s the worst dancer in the world and probably too sober to prove it and he keeps looking at Kyungsoo like he might snap and kill him on the spot. Yixing takes Baekhyun’s hand, spins him in a circle, and the room spins too and he is laughing so hard he can't catch his breath. He missed this. He missed being _like_ this. He loves all of them and it's too much, too hot, too _much_.

"I'm going to find my spiky plant,” he tells Yixing, perching his chin on his shoulder so he can hear.

“Don’t stay away so long this time,” says Yixing, maybe confused but maybe not. Baekhyun skips back to Kyungsoo and Chanyeol who are watching him with two sets of the biggest eyes in the world. He claps in Chanyeol’s face so he jumps and he throws his arm around Kyungsoo’s shoulders. He pulls away immediately but he’s smiling, always smiling, drunk Kyungsoo smiles so much it’s overwhelming.

“Come with me,” he says, nudging at Kyungsoo, pushing him into movement. “You’re not invited Chanyeol.”

“Why would I want to come?” Chanyeol scoffs. “I’ve already seen you naked.”

Baekhyun drags a laughing Kyungsoo from the room by the hand. He thinks he knows where Yixing’s bedroom is, though he hasn’t spent much time there. He pulls Kyungsoo through doorways and down halls. He stumbles going upstairs, collapses into giggles when Kyungsoo trips too, hands falling to Baekhyun’s shoulder, his waist. His breath warms Baekhyun’s ear. He rights himself quickly and pulls Baekhyun to his feet and they continue. Baekhyun wonders what would happen if he quit uni and then he bites on his lower lip until the thought goes away. He wonders what would happen if he ran away to live in the forest. They reach Yixing’s room and Baekhyun throws the door open as dramatically as he can.

“What are we doing here?” Kyungsoo asks. He looks bleary eyed and confused. He’s run his hands through his hair so many times it’s fallen back across his forehead, floppy and soft. He doesn’t look worse for it. Baekhyun shakes his head, tugs his sweater off, getting caught in the sleeves for a moment but managing it eventually. He’s wearing a black t-shirt underneath, almost identical to Kyungsoo’s, except he wears his oversized. He laughs but Kyungsoo is frowning.

“I left clothes here,” Baekhyun tries to explain. “A cactus.”

“A cactus,” Kyungsoo echoes. “Are you... did you and Yixing...”

“ _No_ ,” Baekhyun laughs again. “Oh we might have kissed once but I kind of think that was actually either a dream or Chanyeol. I haven’t seen... I haven’t been here in... Did you know I didn’t do my test today? I went but... I didn’t write anything. I just kept thinking that someone would look at it, what I wrote, some person who didn’t know anything about me, why i’m doing this, and... I didn’t write anything.”

“Baekhyun-”

“Ah!” Baekhyun spots the sweater, folded amongst Yixing’s own, on top of a clothes rack. It’s pastel pink with a tiny embroidered cactus and he doesn’t think he’d ever wear it now and it’s a little bit like seeing a younger version of himself. Pink and spiky. He folds up his grey sweater and puts it where the pink one had been. It will be a hook in his lip, he thinks, so he comes back one day. He wants to come back. If he looks at Kyungsoo he’s sure he will die so he folds the sweater carefully instead, busies himself making everything look as it was. The air is thick around him, his body moves slowly through it.

Kyungsoo touches his arm and he turns and they’re suddenly so close, almost no space between them, and Baekhyun remembers that he’s supposed to kiss him, to fix his life. Kyungsoo’s hand is still at his elbow and he looks so concerned, his eyes wide, his lips parted. Baekhyun smiles, falls into bliss, and kisses him. He imagines that Kyungsoo kisses him back, opens his mouth, doesn’t care about mountain dew and soju, wants to taste him anyway, but he doesn’t. He pulls away immediately, a skipped-step backwards, his hand falling from Baekhyun’s arm, half a gasp. Baekhyun only has time to feel the warmth of his lips, less than a second, less than a breath, and then gone. He laughs, shuts his eyes, finds the pink sweater again and hides his burning cheeks by pulling it on and tugging it straight.

“ _Baekhyun_ ,” says Kyungsoo, his voice strangled. Baekhyun turns back to him, focusses on his left ear instead of his eyes, his mouth. His smile hurts a little.

“That was... I’m stupid,” he says, “it doesn’t matter. I think I should go home. Are you staying here tonight? I was going to but now I think... the last bus back is soon so I’ll... I’ll go. I should tell Chanyeol though.”

“I’ll come with you,” says Kyungsoo. “I wasn’t going to stay here anyway. I’ll go and find Chanyeol and come back and get you. Two minutes, okay? Stay here until I come back.”

“Alright,” Baekhyun spins on his toes. Kyungsoo leaves and he throws himself onto Yixing’s bed. He feels sick and dizzy and stupid and stupid and stupid. Byun Baekhyun: failed tests and failed kisses. He covers his face with his hands, yells soundlessly into his palms, just teeth scraping skin. This is what he gets for leaving the house. This is what he gets for forgetting how to write. He considers leaving, wandering off into the night, but decides that will only make Kyungsoo angry and he doesn’t want that. He will wait and hope that Kyungsoo hasn't already decided to hate him.

Kyungsoo comes back and Baekhyun bites his tongue and finally meets his eyes. He looks like he’s trying to see under Baekhyun’s expression, to find some truth there, but Baekhyun won’t let him. He is Baekhyun of the past, drunk in pastel pink, and this Baekhyun has never even met Kyungsoo and would _never_ let him see under his skin.

“I told you I kissed Chanyeol once too,” he says. “This was like that, I'm a very friendly drunk. I'm very friendly normally too, did you notice? Pretend it didn’t happen.”

“That’s what you want?”

“Yeah,” Baekhyun brushes passed him, out the door. “Come on, we’ll miss the bus.”

They sit at the back of the bus, knees knocking together. When he gets home he’s going to have think think about how badly this day has gone and earlier he’d been grateful that the bus ride was so short but he isn’t now. Maybe if he’d carved Kyungsoo’s name into the back of a seat he wouldn’t have done something so stupid. Maybe when he’s sober he’ll be able to pass it off as some drunk mistake, but he can’t do that yet, not with Jongdae’s punch still killing his brain cells. Maybe he won’t remember in the morning. He wants to hold Kyungsoo’s hand. He wants to be a social worker. He probably won’t get to do either.

“You should be angry,” he says, kicking the back of the seat in front of them.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he laughs, “because I’m an idiot.”

“No you’re not, you’re drunk. I am too.”

“You shouldn’t want to ever see me again.”

“I thought we were pretending you didn't kiss me.”

“I didn’t,” Baekhyun sniffs, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah, my mistake.”

They fall into silence and it feels a little easier then somehow. Baekhyun leans against the seat in front of them, rests his cheek against his forearms, and then Kyungsoo does too and they’re face to face and in some small space of their own. Kyungsoo looks tired, the skin under his eyes looks soft, his mouth looks soft, his skin looks soft. Baekhyun doesn't quite understand why he didn't kiss him back. He’s sure they have been flirting, he’s _sure_ it isn't quite one sided. He wants to touch the bow of Kyungsoo’s lips, so he shuts his eyes. Maybe he’s just not allowed the things he wants.

They reach the campus and walk together to Baekhyun’s apartment block. Baekhyun can't think of anything to say so he stays silent for once and fidgets and frets. Kyungsoo is like he always is, quiet and contained, even with the flush of alcohol still on his cheeks. It’s not as hot as it was inside and Baekhyun wonders if talking makes you warmer too. Leaving his grey sweater in Yixing’s room no longer makes sense to him. Kissing Kyungsoo doesn’t either. Turning in a blank test seems like the sanest thing he’s done all day.

“Call me tomorrow,” Kyungsoo tells him, when they stop outside Baekhyun’s.

“Maybe,” says Baekhyun. “I have to study.”

“We can do it together.”

“Maybe.”

“Baekhyun, I just... I don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Baekhyun’s heart is beating triple time. He tries to pull the cuffs of his sweater over his knuckles but the sleeves aren't long enough. He scuffs his shoes along the concrete instead.

“Drunk... kisses, whatever,” says Kyungsoo, sounding exasperated and amused.

“Oh.”

“Especially not with you.”

“Why especially?”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Baekhyun cocks his head to one side, sticks out his tongue, and Kyungsoo rolls his eyes and pushes at Baekhyun’s shoulder and he pretends to stumble, presses his hands to his heart like he's wounded.

“You’re so annoying,” Kyungsoo mutters, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“Go home you drunk.”

“Drink water before you sleep.”

“You too.”

Baekhyun blows kisses at him as he leaves, walking backwards, grinning widely, and Kyungsoo fans a hand in front of his face like he’s fending them off and everything feels alright again. It’s not, but it might be. Inside, Baekhyun lies on his bed and wills his phone to ring. He wants his lecturer to call him and tell him him his test was destroyed somehow and can he come in to resit? This is what kissing Kyungsoo was supposed to make happen, but it doesn’t. His phone remains unmoved. He falls asleep soon after, put under by Jongdae’s punch at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is kinda longer than usual cos i didnt want to split the test and the party up. i hope you like it! thank you for reading! uh jongdae's punch is based on the way me and my friends sometimes drink, because soju is really cheap even here. personally, i mix it with garbage cider and it is appropriately awful. don't be like me and jongdae kids!!! 
> 
> edit: ah ok in case anyone is confused and doesn't see my comment below, the parents he calls here are his foster parents not his.. ghost parents!


	9. Chapter 9

It’s raining when Baekhyun wakes up. He gets out of bed, drags his blanket after him so he can drape it around his shoulders while he walks. He feels shaky inside, his skin thin and a headache behind his eyes and fuzzy teeth and a weak stomach. He walks over to the window, rests his forehead against the cool glass. Everything is grey; the grey of other buildings around his, the grey of rain, the grey of the sky, reflected in windows. He licks his lips and then he licks them again because they’re sticky and rough.

“Good morning,” he says, to test whether or not his voice is stuck in a hangover too. It catches on his dry lips and he sounds croaky and tired, but alive. He draws a smile in the condensation on the window and heads out into the living room.

Baekhyun’s hangovers are typically terrible but almost never suffered alone. He drinks in a group and falls asleep in a group and wakes up in a group. Even if it is just Chanyeol and Jongdae. They’ll go and get haejangguk and then spend the rest of the day draped over furniture and Jongdae will whine and Baekhyun will beg affection and Chanyeol will be uncharacteristically silent. But that hasn’t happened in a long time and Chanyeol is at Jongdae’s still so the apartment is empty. Baekhyun drifts.

In the shower he throws up stomach acid and then sits in the corner of the booth, arms wrapped around his knees, blowing water from his mouth, watching it fall in streams across his skin. It was stupid of him to skip meals before drinking. He thinks he ought to write that down, something to tell his kids, _always drink on a full stomach_. Maybe he should write a book of advice for young people instead of wasting his time with higher education. He turns off the shower, brushes his teeth three times, goes to the kitchen to get an ice cube to chew on.

  
(11:33) chanyeollie~

(11:33) my favourite person~~

(11:34) light of my life~~~

_(11:35) there are so many ways i could have jongdae kill you_

(11:35) bring me food

_(11:35) get your bf to do it_

(11:37) hahahahahaha

(11:37) please im really dying

_(11:38) ill give kyungsoo your best selfies_

_(11:38) to remember you by_

(11:39) im going to sit on your guitar

_(11:40) think carefully about which organs you’d like to keep_

(11:40) see you this afternoon?

_(11:40) yup, try to stay alive_

_(11:41) did you have a good time last night?_

(11:42) im not sure

(11:43) ill tell you when i know

  
He goes back to bed. Throwing up hasn’t settled his stomach, just added a burning throat to his symptoms. His headache is deciding whether to settle quietly under his skull or tip over into a full grown migraine. His hands are shaking a little. He lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling, a palate cleanser, the only thing that doesn’t add to the noise of his hangover. He’s never drinking again. Or maybe he should get drunk more often, so it doesn't seem so bad. He can’t remember it ever being like this before. Maybe it’s a punishment for the test or for kissing Kyungsoo. No, not _kissing_ , just touching really, just two mouths touching for half a second. Not kissing. He can’t be punished for something that wasn’t even kissing. The test though...

“To my favourite professor,” he says, as loud as his hangover will let him, “I am writing to explain the test I recently submitted.”

Except of course he can’t explain it, not even to the air, so he sighs and shuts his eyes again. The party swims in and out of his head, tilting blackness blurring his memory of it. He’d danced with Yixing. A girl with red hair had made Jongin laugh. He wants to call Kyungsoo but he’s not sure if he can. It will be different now, because he pushed too hard. It wasn’t a real kiss but he’s afraid it might have broken them anyway.

When Kyungsoo calls him instead he almost doesn’t pick up. He feels sick and tired and maybe he will always feel sick and tired and answering the phone seems like some huge effort he doesn’t have the energy to make. The geodude vibrates aggressively. Maybe Kyungsoo will fix him. He picks up.

“You know I’m dying because of you.”

“You do kind of sound close to death,” says Kyungsoo, his own voice rough like he’s only just woken up.

“I thought we were friends.”

“We are, so eat with me.”

“What?”

“You can die after.”

“You want to eat now?”

“Can you stand?”

“I have to study.”

“Can you _study_?”

Baekhyun lies back flat on his bed, kicks his feet into the air. His stomach protests and his knees protest and his head protests. He needs to eat enough for a whole family. He needs to figure out what to do with his life. He needs to sit in the sunlight for a thousand years. It’s still raining outside. He wants to see Kyungsoo.

“Tell me where to go.”

They eat in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant a little out of the way of the usual places students go. Kyungsoo’s umbrella has a duck-head handle and Baekhyun laughs about it until Kyungsoo flicks water in his face. The restaurant has been emptied out by the rain and they sit in the back, a booth, walled in on three sides. Just seeing Kyungsoo makes Baekhyun feel better; watching him pour them both water and set out spoons and chopsticks. It makes the air seem less grey, small things like that, the way his eyes follow his hands, careful to keep the glasses and the water jug and the cutlery from knocking against one another. His skin looks dry and his lips are cracking a little but he is still lovely. He makes Baekhyun feel a little bit more in control somehow, just the way he folds his hands or holds his chopsticks. It quietens something in him. It’s a dangerous feeling, and unfamiliar, so Baekhyun swallows it.

“I think you were secretly drinking water all night,” he says, gesturing at Kyungsoo’s face, “to look like that now.”

“What am I supposed to look like?”

“Like me, like a corpse,” Baekhyun shrugs. “Shrivelled from dehydration.”

“I don’t think you have any idea what you look like right now.”

Baekhyun shakes his head, picks up the laminated menu, runs his finger down the items listed there even though they’ve already ordered. This was a terrible idea. Kyungsoo’s hair is wet from the shower still and this was a _terrible_ idea. Baekhyun hums under his breath. He needs to study. He needs to stop feeling comfortable in places where he shouldn’t. There are textbooks in his room he needs to read, he has more assignments due soon and he’ll have to do them perfectly to make up for what the test lost him. His skin is so sensitive the inside of his sweater feels like sandpaper. He thinks he would like to hide his hands in Kyungsoo’s sleeves, palms pressed against the backs of his wrists, fingers curled under.

Their food comes and Baekhyun busies himself with his meal. He leans close to the bowl so the steam opens his pores and then he gulps down a spoonful of soup so fast his throat burns. It’s better though, a better sort of pain to the hangover, sharper and clearer and less like muddied water. He shuts his eyes so he feels it deeper.

“What are you going to do about your test?”

Baekhyun opens his eyes. Kyungsoo’s expression is open, curious, concerned, and Baekhyun considers knocking his chopsticks from his hands or storming out. Some useless, dramatic act.

“Um,” he says, instead, “I’m not going to do anything.”

“If you emailed your lecturer to explain, they might let you resit.”

“Explain what?” he shakes his head. “No, I have to do this by myself.”

“You are though,” Kyungsoo says, bemused. Baekhyun picks up a piece of kimchi with his chopsticks, focusses on chewing it to nothing. “Asking for help when you need it is... it’s not giving up. You’re still doing all the work.”

“We should stop talking about this,” Baekhyun laughs, a skeletal sound. “How many people fell in love with me last night? I remember hip thrusting so it must have been a lot.”

“Some,” says Kyungsoo, “I’m sure.”

“I’m good at breaking hearts.”

“I doubt that.”

They fall into silence again, both of them concentrating on their meals. Baekhyun’s hands stop shaking and his skin stops feeling about to tear. His stomach settles but his headache stays. Kyungsoo looks smaller, sat across from him, his shoulders sloped, his hands neat, his glasses misted with steam from his food. Baekhyun feels impossibly huge and clumsy. He isn’t good without people but he wants to be able to finish university on his own. Fail university on his own. Ruin his life on his own.

“Remember when we first met?” Kyungsoo’s voice cuts through his thoughts. He remembers Kyungsoo falling, the dark of his hair. His grazes must be healed by now.

“Yeah,” he wrinkles his nose, “I almost killed you.”

“No, you skipped class to help me bandage my hands.”

“After almost killing you.”

“Baekhyun, you missed two classes to help a stranger and now that I do know you, that seems impossible. I think that when you’re finished here, when you’re working, you’ll be _so_ good at it, but I don’t think you’ll get there if you keep going like this. You need to look after yourself too.”

“I’m eating aren’t I? I’m... I’m here with you instead of studying, I went to a party, I fixed your _door_. You’re thinking about this too much, I’m actually fine.”

“Chanyeol told me you don’t sleep at all some nights.”

“Don’t talk to him about me.” Baekhyun’s skin itches. He’s going to have to murder Chanyeol. Chanyeol and Jongdae and Kyungsoo too, probably. Anyone who has ever said his name when he wasn’t there.

“I’m just-”

“Let’s talk about how I kissed you instead of this,” Baekhyun interrupts. His cheeks are burning but he doesn’t care, he thinks that if they keep talking about his studies he’ll have to leave and he doesn’t want to be angry with Kyungsoo. He doesn’t really know how to be angry with anyone. Drunken kisses are safer, more ridiculous, and so far not as life threatening. Drunken kisses between boys in empty rooms.

“What about it?” Kyungsoo asks, blunt as stone. “If you don’t have time to sleep you definitely don’t have time for kissing.”

“No,” Baekhyun bites down on the inside of his cheek until it hurts. He finishes his glass of water. “You’re right, I don’t have time for that.”

“Baekhyun-”

“You should come home with me.”

“What?”

“Come home with me,” Baekhyun repeats. “I can... we don’t have to study or anything I just... I feel sick and Chanyeol won’t be home yet and I really... it would be nice if you were there. If you want to, I mean, obviously you don’t have to.”

“Sure,” Kyungsoo nods. His expression isn’t what Baekhyun thinks it ought to be, it’s more gentle, less brittle, more sad. He isn’t looking at Baekhyun like he might snap. He doesn’t know what to do with that, because he can’t imagine a world where he deserves it, so he finishes his soup instead of thinking about it.

He supposes it’s something like panic that prompts him to invite Kyungsoo back to his place. The idea of being alone sets his teeth on edge. He needs to study, he really does, and he needs to sleep, but he’ll do that later, when his muscles have stopped aching enough to work a pen or turn a page or shut his eyes. If he’s alone with this he thinks he’ll fall apart. Being hungover is a strange sort of disappointing, after the frantic familiarity of being drunk, and he knows that all he’ll be able to think about, without someone to talk to, is everything he’s done wrong.

They walk back to Baekhyun’s apartment, sharing his polka-dotted umbrella because it’s the biggest. They bump against one another as they walk, trying not to get caught in the rain. Baekhyun wants to link arms with Kyungsoo, to pull him closer still, but he doesn’t. He’s uncomfortably comfortable still. He wants to jump in puddles but he contents himself with kicking at the water running in the curb, splashing their shins, the hems of their jeans, and Kyungsoo elbows him in the ribs and _that’s_ closer and almost enough.

In the elevator, he leans against the doors, pressing his forehead to the seam where they shut, eyes closed. When the sound for his floor chimes he holds his breath and waits for it to open and pitch him forward into the hallway so he can catch himself on last-minute heavy steps and jump-start himself awake. But when the doors open Kyungsoo pulls him back by the collar, fingers cold against his neck. He laughs, pulls away, laughs again when Kyungsoo’s hand stays caught and they are yanked closer together, Kyungsoo’s hand curved around Baekhyun’s throat, Baekhyun’s elbow tucked against Kyungsoo’s side. Kyungsoo laughs too, pushes him away and ahead, through the doors and into the hallway. Baekhyun’s headache rides the movement and keeps him from getting too giddy about it and he’s grateful, that cool hands and closeness don’t send him into a spiral. None of it seems real anyway, in that sepia way that mornings after parties always are, but it almost wakes him up, like false-falling was supposed to.

Being home alone with Kyungsoo is different to being home alone with Chanyeol. Kyungsoo doesn’t try to fill empty space with big sounds and bigger movements, but he isn’t small. Baekhyun drags him around by the sleeve, a mini-tour of the small rooms that are his home, even though Kyungsoo has been there before. He still asks questions, about the magnets on the fridge, the cactuses lining one windowsill, the photo stuck to the ceiling, too small and far away to make out.

“It’s from our first party,” Baekhyun explains. “We’re partly clothed. Do you want to break Chanyeol’s door?”

“I don’t think I’m well enough for property damage.”

In Baekhyun’s room, Kyungsoo traces the post-its on the walls with his index finger. Baekhyun thinks they must make him look crazy, but Kyungsoo doesn’t say anything. He takes one down, pumpkin orange, shows it to Baekhyun stuck on the pad of his finger.

“This just has my name on it,” he says, looking slightly confused but still smiling. Baekhyun takes it off him, squints at what he’s written there in thick, black marker. He doesn’t remember writing it but he’s grateful he didn’t think to add any hearts.

“Chanyeol must have written that,” he says,” he’s kind of obsessed with you.” Kyungsoo takes the post-it back and puts it in his pocket.

When the curative properties of haejangguk start to fade and Baekhyun starts to feel too sick to do anything again, he drags Kyungsoo with him. He grabs Kyungsoo’s wrist, climbs onto his bed, pulls at his sleeve until he rolls his eyes and follows. They lie down together, above the covers, space between them though not much. They talk about themselves, similarities and differences, things they love and hate. Kyungsoo broke his collarbone when he was eight, climbing the skeleton of a half-built house to see how it was put together. He loves swimming but hates sand. He’s never learned to ride a bike.

“I’ll get you one with training wheels,” says Baekhyun, “and we can go riding in the park.”

Baekhyun tells him about his parents, when they reach that sort of thing naturally. He keeps his eyes on the ceiling and drags his hands through the air like a wave as he explains and Kyungsoo doesn’t make the normal sympathetic noises most people do, he just shuffles close enough that he can nudge at Baekhyun’s shoulder with his own.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Me too,” says Baekhyun.

Lying there with him, Baekhyun feels less like he is wasting time than usual. His next assignments are a few weeks away and not impossible. His test was a mistake but he’s not ruined. There are a thousand kids out there, grazed knees and runny noses and dead parents and bad ones and Baekhyun’s determination to help them hasn’t gone anywhere either. He has everything he needs to get through this, he might just need to change his methodology. Highlighters instead of post-its.  
  
“I don’t know why you’re here,” he says, because he can’t have anything easily. He rolls onto his stomach, nuzzling into his pillow so it muffles his words and so he can’t see Kyungsoo’s face. “You’re practically saving my life but you get nothing out of it.”

“I wouldn’t say nothing,” says Kyungsoo, quietly. Baekhyun burrows further into his bedding. “You brought me chocolate, you watched a movie with me instead of asking questions. I’m... comfortable with you, and I’m not comfortable with many people.”

“I’ll annoy you too much pretty soon.”

“You annoy me now, but it’s not a bad thing.”

“Why do you want to be an architectural engineer?” Baekhyun rolls back over onto his side so he’s propped up on an elbow, looking down at Kyungsoo who has shut his eyes. His eyelashes are dark and he presses his lips together just slightly before he answers.

“Because I like what can be made out of empty space but I’m not creative in the same way an architect is. Why do you want to be a social worker?”

“Because of what you said, because I want to make people comfortable,” Baekhyun sighs, flops back onto his back. “I had five social workers who made everything worse and only one who helped me. I want to be like him because that’s... that’s not good enough.”

“You should talk to Jongin’s parents, they’re teachers but his mum does research on kids growing up in the social welfare system here.”

“I’m sure she’ll want to hear from a failing undergrad then.”

“Yeah, she would.”

“Do you want to watch a movie?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Would you hate me if I fell asleep?”

Kyungsoo doesn’t reply so Baekhyun rolls onto his side again. Kyungsoo is facing him, eyes half closed, a slight frown creasing his forehead. Baekhyun wants to push his hair out of his eyes, like that will make it easier to see what he’s thinking. He doesn’t, he sticks his tongue out, waggles it until Kyungsoo smiles.

“Your face will freeze like that,” he says.

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll still be cute,” Baekhyun retorts.

“If you fall asleep I’ll leave.”

“No you won’t.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have time for kissing.”

“Is that what’s going to happen here?”

Kyungsoo narrows his eyes like he’s taking the question very seriously and then he grins, a flash of teeth, and rolls back onto his back. Baekhyun’s heart is humming and his skin feels just as sensitive as it had in the restaurant, like a touch would burn it up to nothing. He can’t stop smiling, it tugs at his mouth like he’s never known another expression, just a nervous sort of bliss. He’s doomed, really, he never stood a chance against Kyungsoo’s mouth, his eyes, his hands. Kyungsoo takes off his glasses then and the sight of them folded up on Baekhyun’s bedside table is almost too much. He sighs, drops onto his back, close enough to Kyungsoo that their arms touch, shoulder to elbow to wrist.

It’s Kyungsoo who moves first, taking Baekhyun’s hand, threading their fingers together. Baekhyun shuts his eyes. He is still smiling like an idiot but he doesn’t care, he feels sick and stupid and happy and ruined but he doesn’t care. He wants to pinch Kyungsoo’s cheeks, tease him for falling for his dubious charms, tell him that he’s made a terrible mistake, lock himself in the bathroom, call Chanyeol, call his brother, kiss Kyungsoo, run away. He focusses on the way that they are touching instead, the heels of their palms, the pads of Kyungsoo’s fingers bridging Baekhyun’s knuckles, the softness at the insides of their wrists.

“This isn’t because I like your personality,” says Kyungsoo, thumb rubbing circles against Baekhyun’s skin. “I just like your face.”

“I knew it,” Baekhyun laughs, covers his face with his free hand then changes his mind, turns to hide his smile against  Kyungsoo’s shoulder instead. He throws his arm across Kyungsoo’s waist and Kyungsoo shivers under him and maybe it’s residual nausea from a hangover but Baekhyun doesn't think so.

It is uncomfortable though, with their held hands caught between their bodies. Baekhyun kind of wants to wriggle free and throw his whole body across Kyungsoo’s, just to see what he would do, but he’s also tired and warm and never wants to move again. He can live with the discomfort, he decides.

“I’m serious about sleeping,” he mumbles against Kyungsoo’s collar. If he moves an inch higher his mouth will be against his neck.

“I know,” murmurs Kyungsoo, a low rumble, “I’m tired too.”

“We’d be more comfortable if we took off our clothes.”

“Be quiet.”

“I’m serious, do you sleep naked? I sleep naked in the summer, it’s really-”

“Go to sleep,” Kyungsoo interrupts. Baekhyun tilts his head so he can see Kyungsoo’s face. His eyes are closed, but he’s smiling.

“Goodnight kiss?” he asks, in the most obnoxiously cute voice he can muster. Kyungsoo opens one eye, squints down at Baekhyun, expression calculating. A second passes, and then another, and then Kyungsoo leans forward and presses his lips to Baekhyun’s forehead, just for a moment. It might be only a little longer than the drunk kiss at Jongdae’s but it’s sweeter and warmer and infinitely better. Kyungsoo lies back and shuts his eyes again. His ears are pink.

“That was romantic,” Baekhyun teases, wriggling closer to him. “You’re really cute.”

“It’s never happening again.”

“Just one more?”

“No, go to sleep.”

“I don’t think I can sleep now, my heartbeat is too fast, you may as well kiss me again.”

“Do you want me to hit you instead?”

“Kinda?”

“Oh my god,” Kyungsoo pushes him away, palm to his shoulder, but it’s without real force and Baekhyun laughs as he falls back onto his own pillow.

Kyungsoo follows him anyway, sits up so he can look down at Baekhyun, grinning amongst pillows. His expression is serious, still, and Baekhyun’s throat hurts a little from holding back flowery compliments or terrible sexual innuendos. Some awful part of his head is chanting _take it off take it off_ and he can’t quiet it.

Kyungsoo’s eyelids droop a little, half-closed, eyelashes and skin smudged at the corners, and he chews absently at his lower lip. He doesn’t say anything but he seems to come to a decision and then he puts his hands on Baekhyun’s shoulders and Baekhyun’s pretty sure his heart stops. He doesn’t _do_ anything either, not really, just rearranges Baekhyun’s limbs a little and then lies back down, apparently satisfied that he’ll be comfortable. He rests his head where Baekhyun’s shoulder meets his chest, he pulls Baekhyun’s arm around his shoulders, he mumbles something soft as he settles back into place. Baekhyun doesn’t really know what to do, it’s been a long time since he’s held anyone like this, but he curls his arm a little tighter over Kyungsoo’s shoulder and Kyungsoo sighs so he thinks he’s doing okay. He doesn't know how they got here. Kyungsoo’s broken door seems a thousand years ago and even the party feels distant now. Baekhyun should be studying. He doesn't care. It's still raining. He shuts his eyes and drifts again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took! forever! or at least a lot longer than usual. i'm sorry about that! it was v hard to write. i think maybe i got kind of... out of the writing mood for awhile. i haven't got much to procrastinate atm. but it's happy right? i mean, a happier chapter than the last few. i won't be mean to baek forever. ok! thank you so much for reading! it's really. it makes me really happy reading your comments and i get kinda flustered replying, i hope i dont sound.. idk.. whatever. it's really nice. ty ty ;-;


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick warning for a... uh vaguely described anxiety attack of sorts. not that baek isn't in this state permanently but, it's a little different here.

Kyungsoo is still sleeping when Baekhyun wakes up. He is curled up small, facing Baekhyun, one hand gripping Baekhyun’s t-shirt, though they aren’t touching anywhere else. Just Kyungsoo’s knuckles resting against Baekhyun’s hip. One of his cheeks is squished against his pillow, the sort of squished that will leave seams against his skin, where there are creases in the pillowcase. Baekhyun lies there for a moment, beside him, listening to the quiet huffs of his breath, thinking maybe he’s still dreaming. No, not dreaming, being creepy, he decides, and he awkwardly wriggles off the bed, disentangling Kyungsoo’s hand from his t-shirt, careful not to wake him.

It had been thirst that woke him so he goes to the kitchen, pours himself a glass of water from the jug in the fridge. He and Chanyeol’s class timetables are stuck to the door with heart shaped magnets. He needs to study. It’s a compulsive thought and one that hardly ever leaves him and he taps his fingernails against his glass. He feels swollen with sleep. He runs his tongue over his teeth and grimaces at their roughness. He swishes water around in his mouth and spits into the sink.

“Gross,” says Chanyeol from behind him, eerily silent in fluffy socks.

“You’re gross,” Baekhyun mutters. “Keep your voice down.”

“Why, are you still hungover?” He laughs. “Baekhyunnie! Are you still dying?” He raises his voice, stretching up onto his toes like he’s at his loudest when he’s also at his tallest. Baekhyun pokes him in the ribs and he folds, laughing.

“Seriously, Kyungsoo’s... he’s sleeping.”

“Oh my-”

“Quiet!”

" _Oh my god_ ,"  Chanyeol whisper-hisses, eyes comically wide. He grabs Baekhyun, half a hug and half a headlock, and jumps them both around the room. Baekhyun struggles but his heart is in his throat and he’s smiling, trying to keep from laughing. Kyungsoo is asleep in his bed, what a strange thing. Maybe it’s a little wonderful.  


“He’s  _ sleeping _ ,” he says, because it’s true and because he needs to stop, he’s making things up again. “We were both sleeping, don’t make it weird.” 

“The only way it’s not weird is if you’re boyfriends.”

“Whatever, me and you have slept together lots of times.”

“Yeah, but we’ve never had amorous feelings towards one another.”

“I don’t have amorous anything.”

“You’re like ninety nine percent amorous.”

“I need to study,” Baekhyun swerves to his default, pulls at a loose thread at the hem of his t-shirt. Chanyeol’s enthusiasm is making it feel too much like it’s a real thing and he and Kyungsoo haven’t even  _ talked _ yet. His good mood wobbles and falls.

“And one percent out of your mind,” Chanyeol rolls his eyes. “Why is it that whenever you get uncomfortable you remember you need to study?”

“Shut up, Chanyeol.”

“I’m serious, you get nervous or annoyed or even too fucking  _ happy _ and then you think, oh shit, I need to study. I don’t know how you deal with feeling so... so guilty all the time.”

“I don’t,” Baekhyun laughs, “I don’t deal with it at all, you know that. We should... how’s work?”

“What the  _ fuck _ ,” Chanyeol presses a palm to his forehead. “Work’s fine, how’s Baekbeom?”

“I... don’t know,” Baekhyun puts his glass on the bench. The fruit bowl is empty. “Why didn’t you get any mangoes?”

“Baekhyunnie-”

“Do we have pineapple at least?”

“You should see a counsellor.”

“I think I’m still tired, I’m going to nap.” He pushes passed Chanyeol, who sighs, and he’s halfway to his room when the door opens and Kyungsoo is there. His t-shirt is rumpled and his hair is everywhere and there are red marks across his cheek, just like Baekhyun had known there would be. Everything that Chanyeol had been saying disappears and Baekhyun smiles.

“Morning,” Kyungsoo mumbles, voice thick and rough and perfect.

“It’s like... almost dinner time,” Baekhyun laughs. He wants to step forward, take Kyungsoo’s hands, kiss him a thousand times. He just stands there grinning stupidly instead. Kyungsoo runs a hand through his hair, a faraway smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.

“Evening then,” he says.

“Can you talk some sense into him?” Chanyeol calls from the kitchen. “He’s honestly... just take him home with you okay? Or... or...” he trails off, makes a frustrated noise, disappears back into his room, slamming the door loudly behind him.

“Is he ok?” Kyungsoo frowns. “Are you okay?”

“Ah, no, never,” Baekhyun laughs, “but I’ll get over it.”

“What does he want you to do?”

“A million things,” Baekhyun shrugs. “All of them are impossible.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Yeah, well you don’t know me.”

“I would like to.”

Baekhyun doesn’t know what to say to that so he doesn’t say anything. He reaches across the space between them, plucks at Kyungsoo’s t-shirt, the seam that falls across his shoulder, hoping that he will see something in the movement that tells him he is grateful. He’s good at talking but he’s not good at saying anything. He needs to study. He needs to get a job. He needs to call Baekbeom.

“I promised Jongin I’d have dinner with him,” says Kyungsoo then and Baekhyun realises his hand is still at Kyungsoo’s shoulder, fingertips pressed to his skin, where the collar of his t-shirt ends. He pulls away.

“Then you should hurry,” he says, smiling. Kyungsoo nods, but he doesn't move, he looks at Baekhyun like he’s expecting him to say something else and Baekhyun can't think to do anything but disappoint him. He shakes his head, crosses the room again.

At the front door they stand, quiet and a little awkward and a lot like there is something that has to happen before Kyungsoo leaves. Baekhyun is very conscious of how he must look, his dry skin and sticky eyelashes and the awkward way he’s bouncing from foot to foot. He doesn’t want Kyungsoo to leave, he wants him to stay always, he wants to reach out and take his hand and turn it over so he can inspect his palm, just to see if the lines there can tell him if this is how it’s supposed to be. Him and Kyungsoo.

Baekhyun opens the front door to the hallway and they’re both smiling and Kyungsoo keeps stepping back into Baekhyun’s space, not touching him but moving when he moves, like he’s reacting to the displacement of air and space. Like they’re caught in the same current. Baekhyun grabs his t-shirt again, the front of it, pulls him closer and then lets go, drops his hand to his side, laughs a little helplessly. Kyungsoo grins, pushes him, a gentle palm to his chest, and he rocks back on his heels.

“Get out of here,” says Baekhyun, still smiling stupid.

“I’m trying,” Kyungsoo says, rolling his eyes before pulling his face into something more serious. Baekhyun can see the smile behind it though, and he sticks his tongue out and Kyungsoo breaks and laughs. “Come and see me tomorrow,” he says.

“Maybe,” Baekhyun teases, “I might have plans already.”

“Cancel them.”

“Ask me nicely.”

“Baekhyun,” Kyungsoo tilts his head to one side, licks his lips. Baekhyun’s heart stutters. “I would like it if you came to see me tomorrow.”

“Alright,” Baekhyun grins, presses his hand to his mouth to stop the alarm bells in his head, and then Kyungsoo steps up to him and silences them completely. He kisses his neck, the curve of his jaw, his lips against the flat space there and his hands at his waist. It is another instant, another piece of a kiss Baekhyun can add to the others.

“Go home,” he says, weakly, a little dizzy.

“See you tomorrow,” says Kyungsoo, and he's gone with a smile and a wave.

Baekhyun shuts the front door and then collapses back against it, one hand at his throat where Kyungsoo’s lips had been and one in his hair, pulling it out into a mess of fluff. Who does that? Who kisses someone’s forehead, their  _ neck, _ and then leaves? Kyungsoo is either far more suave than Baekhyun can handle or feeling just as ridiculous as he is. He kicks his heels back against the door, tugs his t-shirt straight, chews on his lips. He hopes it’s the latter, it would be nice not to be alone in turmoil.

He goes back into the kitchen, pours himself another glass of water. His throat is still a little hangover-dry. He stares at Chanyeol’s door, willing it to open, but of course it doesn’t. Chanyeol will have his enormous headphones on and will be hunched too far over in his chair, pushing the brim of his cap around when things aren’t sounding right. Baekhyun should have picked something like music to study, something that feels easy if you’re good at it and careless even when it isn’t. He should have been a pro-gamer, though he’s not actually all that good. He’s not good at much. He’s good at feeling sorry for himself. He tips the rest of his water down the sink, leaves the glass on the bench, goes back to his room.

In his first year, when he's at his worst, Baekhyun plays a game with himself. He writes half of his assignments sober and studied, a model student for all his terror, and the other half he writes drunk. They're never big assignments, one page essays worth ten percent of his grade or take home multiple-choice tests worth the same, but they aren't nothing either. There is never much of a difference in the grades. Drunk Baekhyun has better ideas and more conviction but sober Baekhyun engages more with course material and uses less run-on sentences and correct referencing. Most of the time. He isn't sure which is better.

It's this, and a million other things that push Chanyeol to the end of his tether. He sighs and grumbles and scolds and that's fine but one day he gets angry. Chanyeol who never yells unless he’s scared, not when Baekhyun put his foot through his bass drum or when he argues with his sister or when he can’t get a song right. He yells and says he isn’t sure he can live with Baekhyun anymore and his eyes get tear-bright and his nose gets pink and Baekhyun is so thrown by it he can’t really respond. He doesn’t fight back, he lets Chanyeol’s anger blow itself out. He apologises. He tries harder.

Most of the time it seems a thousand years ago, Chanyeol’s anger and his own tearaway year, but lying in bed with their apartment so quiet, it feels a lot closer than usual. He feels like he’s pushing Chanyeol again.  _ Take him home with you okay? _ He reaches over the side of his bed, grabs the edge of his blanket, rolls himself up in it, Baekhyun-kimbab. He lies like this for a moment, uncomfortably warm, stuck still and unable to properly fight with himself, then he lets go and struggles off his bed. He needs to study.

He starts on his next assignments, choosing essay topics from a list and rounding up initial readings and typing out his thoughts in bullet points. It seems so far away, the due dates for them all, but he knows that if he doesn't start now he never will. He changes his mind, picks new questions, starts again and then again. He starts typing with a pencil, holding it clumsily and poking at the keyboard with the eraser end, taking ten seconds to type one word. He listens to Chanyeol making dinner in the kitchen, holding himself still as a statue. It gets dark outside and then moon-bright. 

His bedroom starts to feel strangely alien as it gets later. Cream walls and a blue duvet, like a guest bedroom, except for the textbooks and the rubbish and the post-its. The post-its, especially, seem suddenly ridiculous, suddenly unhinged. They’re something that started with a reason that’s been forgotten now, paper stuck to paper stuck to a wall. Kyungsoo had taken one of them with him and Baekhyun remembers writing it now, Kyungsoo’s name. He’d done it because he’d been caught on writing his own name one day, over and over, and he thought writing another name might pull him out of it. Kyungsoo had been on his mind and it had worked, sort of, but it seems insane now. All of it. Studying like he does and sleeping like he does and eating like he does. Sticking post-its to the wall like he does. Ruining his life like he does. He peels one off the wall.

“Something about vulnerable children,” he mutters, screwing it up and dropping into into the rubbish bin. His room feels too hot, too alien, cluttered up with neon, and he takes another one down and throws that one away without looking at it. Pretty soon he’s pulling them down in handfuls, not screwing them up but ripping them into small pieces, letting them fall across his palms like confetti, and the room is too hot and his skin is too hot and the walls are bare and he can’t breathe.

He almost over balances, sitting down too heavily at his desk when his knees buckle. He presses his forehead to the cool wood of the desk, picks out the seams of the wood with his hands, the small buttons that cover the screws that hold it all together. It doesn’t smell like wood, it smells like pencil shavings and his own stale breath and the dampness where his mouth is closest to the surface. He presses down harder, until he can feel the cartilage moving in his nose, and he focusses on that strange almost-pain until his breathing slows, gets less sharp and stuttered. Maybe Chanyeol has left already. He lurches to his feet and out of his room, crossing over to Chanyeol’s door, knocking rapidly, hard enough to bruise his knuckles.

“I’m not... worse than I was, right?” he asks, when the door opens, talking over Chanyeol who looks confused, his hair everywhere like he’s been sleeping. He probably has work in the morning. Baekhyun feels worse again.

“W-what?” Chanyeol stutters through a yawn, rubbing at his eyes. All he needs is a teddy bear hanging from one hand and a striped nightgown and he could be an overgrown storybook kid. 

“Worse than I was, first year I mean, the... all of it.” If he has to explain it properly he’s going to cry. Chanyeol blinks and then blinks again and then his face clears and he reaches out, grabs Baekhyun’s elbow, pulls him into a hug. Too tight even with his floppy limbs.

“Stupid,” he mumbles into Baekhyun’s hair. “You think too much. Last year you didn’t leave Jongdae’s bathtub for three days and you only ate rice and you got punched like... a lot of times and all of that's fine, whatever, but it’s hard thing to get over. I think you’re still hungover.”

“Hungover,” Baekhyun echoes.

“Hungover,” Chanyeol confirms, pulling away but leaving his hands on Baekhyun's shoulders. “Just like today except for months. It’s also why you always look so horrible.”

“You’re just jealous,” Baekhyun sniffs, shrugging out of his grip. He feels stupid already, and guilty, and tired. He doesn’t know why he can’t just do his assignments without losing it entirely. He doesn’t know how to do them like it isn’t costing him something. Like he isn’t trying to fail just so he can say he always knew he would. 

“Go to sleep,” says Chanyeol. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“I’m going to see Kyungsoo tomorrow.”

“Then you’ll definitely feel better,” Chanyeol smiles. “I’m glad you like him.”

“I... yeah,” Baekhyun sighs, “yeah I like him a lot.”

“You’re welcome. I’ll be sure to break more doors in the future.”

“Goodnight, Chanyeol.”

“Don’t wake me up again.”

In his room, Baekhyun rolls himself up in his duvet again. He feels better. Stupid, but better. His walls are bare and his heart is quiet and his breathing is still a little laboured but that's just because he’s wrapped so tight. On his bedside table his phone vibrates and he shuts his eyes, wriggles his blanket a little higher over his ears. He falls asleep like this and wakes up an hour later, sweaty and uncomfortable. He shrugs himself out of the blanket, gropes around for his phone, squints at it, too bright in the dark.  
  


**(01:12) I'm sorry if I was weird today**

**(01:13) I should have kissed you properly**

**(01:18) I will**

**(01:18) Tomorrow I will**

**(01:19) If you want me to I mean**

(02:24) ill be expecting great things

**(02:25) Please don't**

(02:25) do kyungsoo: kissing god

**(02:26) Don't come over**

(02:26) geosoo: kissing god

**(02:27) Strawberry Boy: Locked out of my apartment**

(02:27) ill have chanyeol break your door again 

**(02:28) Just like old times**

(02:28) go to sleep

(02:28) dream of me~~~

**(02:30) I will**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took so long again ;-; i wanted to finish this whole thing before the end of the year but i dont think that'll happen oops. definitely it won't hit 15 chapters though, so we're a little bit close. i hope you like it and thank you so much for reading, i appreciate it a lot <3


	11. Chapter 11

Baekhyun wakes up too early. He’s slept a little more than three hours and that’s not even halfway to enough. He kicks his leg out from under the sheets, wriggles himself a little more comfortable, shuts his eyes tight. But before he can fall back asleep he remembers he’s going to see Kyungsoo and they’re maybe going to kiss and then he’s wide awake and smiling into his pillow and it’s hopeless to think that he might steal a couple more hours of dreaming. He wishes he weren’t the sort to get excited about kissing, like a kid gets excited about Christmas morning, but he is. He wishes he were cooler, more like the asshole lead in a drama than the sweet, funny, hopeless best friend, but he isn’t.

“Stupid,” he mumbles into his pillow, “I’m the cute fan-favourite side character with half a storyline, obviously.”

He gets up, opens his curtains. It’s still dark grey outside, the last pieces of the night not quite used up. There are stars in the darkest parts, or satellites maybe. He turns back to his room. His walls are strange and blank without the post-its, though he doesn’t miss them. He misses his idol posters and his shelf of albums and his pinboard of photocards, all given away during a particularly frantic bout of guilt. When Chanyeol is writing songs for SM he’ll start again, he thinks. When he’s finished with university and the military and can trust himself with distractions.

Getting dressed is hard. He can’t stop thinking that maybe Kyungsoo will want to _un_ dress him and what happens then? What if is underwear isn’t cute? What if it’s _too_ cute? What if Kyungsoo doesn’t even try to take off his clothing at all? It’s not even six yet, too early to be thinking about sex, not-sex, the possibility of sex. They haven’t even kissed. Almost aggressively, he picks his cutest underwear, hello kitty, given to him by Chanyeol, of course. If Kyungsoo can’t accept him at his worst... well.

Chanyeol is still asleep. He has work early but not enough to be up before six, because he’s a sane person, some of the time. Baekhyun can’t seem to get his heartbeat to slow down. He drinks a glass of water and stares at the rice cooker. Rinsing rice and putting it in the cooker would be the closest thing to cooking he’s done in awhile. He chews on his lip, decides against it, pulls a box of cereal down from the shelf. It’s sugary and ridiculous and he bought it because it was stupidly expensive and because it pissed off Chanyeol. The only milk they have is banana and he thinks that might actually kill him so he eats the cereal dry, by the handful, instead. Surely there are vitamins in cereal, grains or something? He watches Chanyeol’s door, willing it to open so he can prove he’s eating something even if it’s terrible, but it’s still too early.

(06:01) see how early you make me wake up???

(06:03) i'm a brand new person

He spends his morning floating. Studying seems out of the question, he picks up a pen and breaks the clicker immediately, clicking it too frantically instead of writing anything. Who uses pens anymore anyway? Kyungsoo does, he keeps them in his pocket. Baekhyun’s purple notebook isn’t even a quarter full. He eats more cereal. He tries to make coffee even though he doesn’t like it, but Chanyeol’s coffee isn’t instant and it doesn’t dissolve in boiling water like he thinks it should and he gets grounds in his teeth at the first mouthful and tips the rest down the sink.

Eventually Chanyeol wakes up and they drift together, Chanyeol getting ready for work and Baekhyun trying to stop him getting ready for work.

“Play with me,” he pouts, “play games with me.”

“Did you sleep last night? Why are there coffee grounds in the sink?”

“Your coffee is wrong,” Baekhyun throws himself onto the couch, kicks his feet into the air. “I woke up by mistake.” Chanyeol hums dubiously and starts to get his breakfast ready.

Baekhyun isn’t sure what time he’s supposed to go to Kyungsoo’s, but he can’t imagine it’s the morning. Sundays are for sleeping in until midday or later and then shuffling around in socks and eating whatever you have left in the house because leaving is impossible. That’s what he would do if he wasn’t so ridiculous. Kyungsoo isn’t ridiculous. He hopes he’s sleeping.

Chanyeol leaves a little after eight and Baekhyun eats the extra rice he made just as he knows he’s supposed to. He changes clothes and then he changes clothes again, switching t-shirts, jeans with rips to jeans without. He studies, sort of, in as much as flipping through the pages of textbooks can be called studying. He catches up on music he’s missed, tries his hardest not to feel guilty when he finds a song he likes and plays the music video ten times in a row. He is out of time, stuck in space that shouldn’t be his, because he shouldn’t be awake at all. It doesn’t matter. He plays the song again.

**(09:44) I don’t want someone new**

**(09:44) Go back to sleep and stay as you are**

**(09:45) And then wake up and come and see me**

(09:45) im gonna skip the first bit

(09:45) see you soon~

He does wait a little, because it’s still early, but he’s never been a patient person and he feels too close to flying apart to wait long. He takes chocolate, because he’s taken chocolate every time he’s visited Kyungsoo’s. He takes his backpack, his textbooks, his laptop. He really does need to study. He’s lost his whole weekend to a boy.

In the elevator he fiddles with his hair, squinting at his reflection in the tarnished mirrored walls. Maybe he’s cute enough. He blows his fringe out of his face, smiles with all his teeth, sticks his tongue out. Jongin answers the door and he smiles so slyly that Baekhyun covers his face in his hands and Jongin laughs then, touches his knuckles to Baekhyun’s shoulder.

“I’ll wear headphones,” he says, wickedly.

“Don’t be gross,” Baekhyun scrunches up his face, pushes passed him, ignores the soft laughter that follows.

Kyungsoo’s door is closed and for a moment Baekhyun freezes, not sure what to do. This should be more dramatic, Baekhyun breezing through an open door and taking Kyungsoo in his arms and.... But the door is closed.

“Just knock,” says Jongin, behind him, far too amused than he has any right to be.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” snaps Baekhyun.

But of course he knocks and Kyungsoo’s voice comes soft and sure and Baekhyun opens the door and maybe it’s exactly as dramatic as it should be. He stumbles in his hurry to cross the room, getting caught closing the door behind him or tripping on his shoelaces or on a wrinkle in the carpet or on his heartbeat, rattling through his chest, and Kyungsoo reaches out to steady him, one hand on his shoulder, and he doesn’t fall but he doesn’t slow down either. He throws his arms around Kyungsoo’s neck and Kyungsoo laughs, drops his hands to Baekhyun’s waist, lets him bury his face in his neck. Baekhyun’s heartbeat is all he can hear and his mouth is against Kyungsoo’s skin and Kyungsoo’s fingers dig into his hips then he moves his hands to the small of Baekhyun’s back, under his backpack, holding him tighter.

“I’m scared to let go,” Baekhyun mumbles, ridiculously, eyes squeezed shut.

“Why?” Kyungsoo’s voice moves through him like a ripple, like a tidal wave, slow and low.

“I don’t have time for kissing,” he whispers. Kyungsoo’s arms press tighter still, a comforting weight, like covering yourself in pillows when you’re scared, the safeness of your bed at home, in your room, always yours.

“We can pretend it’s stopped,” says Kyungsoo, “time, I mean. We can pretend an hour is a minute here, if you want.”

Baekhyun laughs, “that’s... that’s sweet, but I’m being stupid. I’ll... give me a second and I’ll be alright. Thank you.” Kyungsoo doesn’t reply and Baekhyun sighs into him, letting his shoulders drop a little, letting himself settle better against Kyungsoo’s body, arms across his back, behind his neck, chest to chest, the short hairs at the back of his neck tickling his nose. He’s being stupid. This is _fine_.

Baekhyun pulls away, looks at Kyungsoo for a moment, meets his eyes for the first time since he arrived. He looks serious, carefully so, like he’s waiting for Baekhyun to give some indication of what he wants or of what he’s allowed to do. Before anything can catch up with him, Baekhyun kisses him. Lets his hand rest against his neck, covering as much skin as he can, and then leans in and kisses him. It’s a soft sort of thing, Kyungsoo’s mouth against his, eyelashes fluttering, noses bumping, chaste and swift and dizzy. Baekhyun pulls away but Kyungsoo has his hands tangled at the collar of his shirt and pulls him back and this kiss is more, open-mouthed and still kind of clumsy but also kind of perfect. They kiss and kiss again, finding new ways to be closer to one another every time. Kyungsoo’s hands sliding under Baekhyun’s shirt, skimming the waistband of his jeans, palm flat against his back, Baekhyun overstepping, almost toppling both of them over, burying his hands in Kyungsoo’s hair, scraping his teeth down the curve of Kyungsoo’s lower lip, standing on tiptoes to get height on him, grinning against his mouth when Kyungsoo tugs him back down by his shirt.

“The backpack is annoying,” murmurs Kyungsoo, a little later, coming up for air. He pulls back a little to tug on the straps.

“It’s convenient,” Baekhyun laughs. “I’m here to study, you know.”

“Are you?” Kyungsoo’s hands travel down the backpack’s straps. He pushes Baekhyun away, pulls him back, drops his hands to his sides. “We should study then.”

“I’ll study if you kiss me three more times.”

“Twice.”

“Four more times.”

“Twice.”

“ _Fine_.”

Kyungsoo kisses him twice and Baekhyun laughs through both of them and Kyungsoo’s smile is better and cuter than strawberry milk. Maybe. Almost.

They sit together at his desk, Jongin’s spare desk chair has remained in Kyungsoo’s room since Baekhyun’s first visit. Baekhyun bounces in his seat, jumping his knees up and down because it sort of makes it easier to keep from throwing himself sideways, flinging his arms around Kyungsoo’s neck, toppling him off his chair and onto the floor.

“Stop fidgeting,” Kyungsoo orders, quietly, and Baekhyun manages it for about a minute, sitting on his hands, opening his laptop, but then he gives up, tiptoes his fingers along his thighs, and Kyungsoo doesn’t seem to really mind that much. He smiles. Baekhyun laughs.

They skip between kissing and studying. Now that they’ve kissed it seems stupid to stop and several times he pushes aside his laptop to lean his head against Kyungsoo’s shoulder, to pick his hand up, kiss the back, to nudge at his shoulder until he turns and kisses him, hard and fast, like it’s the last time he'll do it, though it never is.

They skip between kissing and studying and talking. Kyungsoo leaves his desk to lie on his bed and Baekhyun joins him and they talk like they had at his apartment, everything and nothing, and Baekhyun is sure he will never run out of things to say to him, happy or sad or boring.

“I have hello kitty underwear on.”

“Sexy,” Kyungsoo murmurs, ears pink, and he pushes Baekhyun back into his pillows, kisses his face until he laughs and wriggles away.

“I'm not unhappy I just... want too much,” Baekhyun says, a little later, when the air is quieter, stretching his arms up high above them and squishing motes of dust between his fingers.

“Wanting to help people isn't too much,” says Kyungsoo. “Wanting friends and... and a boyfriend, while you're studying, isn't wanting too much.”

“A _boyfriend_ ,” Baekhyun echoes, teasing, “I don’t think I know what that is.”

“Something I read about once.”

“A myth?”

“Probably not real,” Kyungsoo agrees, and he bridges the space between them to kiss Baekhyun’s nose, his cheek and then his lips again.

In the early afternoon they leave the apartment to eat naengmyeon because it’s humid and Kyungsoo decides he wants noodles. It’s different outside, because it has to be different, and Baekhyun keeps his hands in his pockets so he’s less tempted to reach out and tangle their fingers together. It’s still nice. It’s still a sort of comfort, walking down the street with someone he kissed a few minutes before. It’s still something he’s missed. He isn’t good without people.

At the restaurant he kicks at Kyungsoo’s feet under the table and Kyungsoo scowls at him and swats at his hand with the back of his spoon and Baekhyun rucks up the hem of his jeans with the toe of his sneaker and Kyungsoo hits him again. They eat, they talk, they go back to Kyungsoo’s to lie on his bed and kiss some more. And then Kyungsoo remembers something and his eyes get big and his smile gets bright and everything is ruined.

“Jongin’s mum is the principal of a high school,” he says, something Baekhyun knows, something that makes him suddenly wary, suddenly still. He sits up, untangles himself from Kyungsoo. “And they’re... they’re looking at trying something out, hiring someone who's studying social work, who has the sort of background you do, to help the school counselor. It’d be observation mostly and you’d have to go through the application process, but if you were hired you’d get paid and you could start taking two papers a semester instead of four and I think-”

“Stop” says Baekhyun quietly, voice shaking, hands shaking, insides shaking. He feels full up with ice, a desperate kind of feeling, so different to how the rest of the afternoon has gone it’s hard to believe it’s real.

“I just think-"

“You don’t get to think anything about me.” He remembers how Kyungsoo had sighed against his mouth, he remembers his hands on his elbows, his palms moving over the soft wool of his sweater, his palms moving over the soft skin at his waist.

“Baekhyun I-” Kyungsoo touches Baekhyun’s hand and he stands up abruptly.

“I’m... I have to go,” he says, the words falling from his mouth like smoke, like static. His skin aches, his eyes are burning. He turns away from Kyungsoo and then turns back to him, angry suddenly, or maybe not, he doesn't know, feeling _something_ suddenly. Something hot and choking. “You don’t get to do this,” he says, “you don’t get to just show up and fix my life like... like I can’t do it myself. I’m not a child.”

“I know you’re not.” Kyungsoo sounds dazed, desperate, but Baekhyun doesn't care.

“I never told you to do this, I never said you could use my name anywhere for... for... I didn’t ask you to do this. You can’t... Just leave me alone, okay? Yeah, you should leave me alone.” He turns again, picks up his backpack, hears Kyungsoo saying his name but ignores it, leaves. He takes the stairs instead of the elevator, hurling himself down three steps at a time, crashing into corners, trying to fill his head with noise so he can't think about what just happened.

It sort of works. He gets to the street and he doesn't really feel angry or sad, just silent, just staticky and strange. He holds his breath until he can hear his heartbeat, loud and echoey, and then he starts to walk. It's twilight, he realises, the shadows of buildings stretch out across the pavement and the road. He’s been away from home for awhile. He doesn't want to go back. He doesn't know where he wants to go. He wishes he had a bike. He remembers that Kyungsoo can't ride a bike and stumbles and almost falls and after that he slows down, just walks. His phone buzzes in his pocket and he turns it off without looking at whatever Kyungsoo has said to him. It doesn’t matter.

He ends up at the movies, standing in front of the session times, glowing neon. Everything smells like popcorn and he remembers watching the horror movie with Kyungsoo and he throws himself into the queue to shake that out of his head. He buys a ticket to whatever movie is playing next, it doesn’t matter, something with zombies. The girl at the counter looks at him strangely but she does as he asks, printing out the ticket and smiling.

Sitting in the dark theatre he is reminded that he hates going to the movies alone. His first foster parents would send him to the movies when they didn’t know what to do with him. Baekbeom would be at the library, studying, and Baekhyun was more of a handful than his brother, the ticket price worth it for a couple of hours of silence. He flips his phone over in his hand, is on the verge of turning it on when the adverts start. He puts it back in his pocket, focusses on the screen so hard his eyes water.

He watches three movies, one after the other, and they blur into one another, a mass of colour. Zombies and romance and kids with swords. It doesn’t matter. When the last movie ends he starts walking again. He turns on his phone. He calls Baekbeom, ignoring missed calls and texts he has from Kyungsoo and Chanyeol and Jongdae, but his brother doesn’t pick up. He thinks that he would be a terrible social worker, he can’t even exist properly on his own, he spends most of his time making trouble for other people. He doesn’t understand what’s happening to him, how everything goes wrong so quickly.

Eventually he runs out of pavement and ends up home. Chanyeol lunges at him when he opens the door and Jongdae is there too, face drawn, a worried twist to his mouth. Baekhyun wants nothing more to shut his eyes on both them, but he can’t.

“Are you okay?” Chanyeol asks, hands at his shoulders, trying to see under whatever expression Baekhyun’s wearing. He wonders what it is, what he looks like, if it’s bad. He licks his lips, shrugs out of Chanyeol’s grip.

“I’m fine,” he says. He walks to the kitchen, gets a glass of water. Chanyeol follows him and Jongdae lies down on the couch and shuts his eyes.

“What even happened?” Chanyeol asks, when they’re both leaning against the bench, “Kyungsoo wouldn’t tell me. You need to call him, by the way, he bullied my number out of Jongin. He’s scary, Baek.”

“No he isn’t,” Baekhyun mutters, “and nothing happened. I just... he told me about a job and I... I have to study, it’s stupid to be distracted by... I mean by him.”

“A job? What sort of job?”

“For... for people studying... helping a school counselor.”

“That sounds perfect.”

“It’d mean doing less classes.”

“That sounds _perfect_ ,” Chanyeol repeats, frowning.

“I didn’t ask for his help.”

“You didn’t have to you’re-”

“It’s nothing to do with him.”

“He _likes_ you.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It’s not giving up, asking for help,” says Jongdae, quietly, sitting up to look at them from over the back of the couch, “everyone needs help.”

“I didn't _ask_ for anything,” snaps Baekhyun, close to anger again. There is an award pause.

“Have you eaten?” asks Chanyeol, always able to push passed silence.

“I don’t... I don’t know.” He can’t remember if he got popcorn or anything at the movies. The whole day seems fake and silly and messed up. Chanyeol hustles him to the table, sits him down. Jongdae comes to the kitchen, pours tea leaves into a pot, even though there’s not really enough space for three people. Chanyeol hands Baekhyun a melona from the freezer and starts pulling containers out of the fridge. He feels like he’s moving through sand. He eats the melona slowly, thinking about the cold, his lips, Kyungsoo kissing him. Then Jongdae gives him the tea and he thinks about that, the heat, Kyungsoo kissing him. Something has to change.

“After this semester I’m gonna... I’m gonna stop... for awhile.” As soon as he’s said it, he knows it’s true. There is another long silence. Baekhyun gulps down his tea so quickly it scalds his throat.

“Thank _fuck_ ,” says Jongdae, so loudly Baekhyun jumps, splashing tea onto his hand. He licks it off. Chanyeol hugs him, awkwardly leaning down so he can press his cheek against Baekhyun’s.

“I’m so glad,” he mumbles. “You’re gonna be a really good social worker one day but I’m so fucking glad you’re stopping.”

Baekhyun presses his sleeve to his face, realising that he’s crying a little, and then realising that he can’t stop. Chanyeol pokes at his cheek, pats his hand, goes back to the stove. Baekhyun cries into his elbow, stupid, ugly tears that feel so good he thinks he might not want to stop. Jongdae brings him tissues, ruffles his hair, steals the melona that he’s left melting on the table. He drinks more tea, he sniffles and chokes and sniffles some more. Chanyeol brings him food, kimchi fried rice, just like he’d made the first day Kyungsoo had texted him. He stops crying and they eat together and it’s nice, like it always is. He feels stupid. Stupid and young. But he thinks he’s a little closer to being okay with that.

After eating he has a shower even though it’s already so late. He washes his hair three times, brushes his teeth twice, changes into a clean t-shirt and underwear to sleep in. Not hello kitty, just plain black, like most of his underwear. He gets into bed and turns on his phone. He ignores the flurry of activity, texts Baekbeom, something quick and reassuring, with more emojis than his brother will appreciate. He opens Kyungsoo’s messages. 

**(18:05) Come back**

**(18:07) Seriously come back**

**(18:10) Baekhyun**

**(18:15) Please**

**(18:20) I’m sorry, I was thoughtless**

**(18:40) Please call me**

**(18:40) Please don’t disappear**

**(19:25) I’ve only just found you**

**(21:15) Chanyeol says you’re not at home?**

**[21:20 Missed call from** **geosoo]**

**[21:27 Missed call from geosoo]**

**(21:46) Baekhyun please call someone**

**[22:13 Missed call from geosoo]**

**(22:23) I hope you’re alright, let me know if I can help**

**(22:23) I’ll be awake late if you want to talk**

(02:54) i’m fine ill call you tomorrow

He turns his phone off before Kyungsoo can reply. He lies in bed for a while, wide awake. He feels strange, coming to a decision like this. He wonders if the job at Jongin’s mother’s school will still be there in a year. It doesn’t matter. He knows he couldn’t do it now, like he is, even if he did take less papers. He will have to call his parents. He might have to move home. That will be... hard. Chanyeol won’t mind though, he’ll be able to live with Jongdae, he’ll be glad for it. Baekhyun curls up small, hugging one of his pillows. He’s terrified, of course, but it’s a different sort of terror than he’s used to, almost like a terror he has a little bit of control over. If he passes his papers this semester he’ll be able to defer for awhile. It doesn’t seem impossible. His assignments are passive creatures now, just waiting to be written, not monsters, not scary. He wishes Kyungsoo were with him, warm and soft and comfortable. He doesn’t think he’s ruined it though, not this, Kyungsoo will still be there in the morning, and he doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve that, but he knows it’s true. He has class in the morning. He won’t have had enough sleep but he’ll go, of course, because he has to. His walls are bare but it isn't giving up. He punches his pillow into shape, settles back down, and falls asleep. ****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahaaaaa um i dont have anything to say about this other than it's so silly i can't believe it. i got really nervous about replying to comments suddenly but im gonna try very hard because i appreciate it so much!! i hope you all had nice holidays, i hope you are all happy. thank you for reading!


	12. Chapter 12

It has always been easy for Baekhyun to add a qualifier to his achievements. He is thirteen and he gets an A on a social studies assignment, but that’s because his brother is a genius and helps him with his homework. He is fifteen and allowed to take his exams late, but that’s because his parents are dead and no one really knows how to deal with it. He is eighteen and he gets into a good university on a partial scholarship, but that’s because he has a social worker who knows how to make him fit into the boxes that need ticking. It bothers him in a way he can’t explain, an itch under his skin that reminds him that he can’t do anything on his own. He’s stupid, lazy, a fake. He isn’t good without people.

“No one is,” Chanyeol had said once, when he’d told him this, drunk on peach soju, “everyone has people.”

“It’s not the same,” Baekhyun had whined, shaking the last drops from the bottle onto his tongue, “I’m extra pathetic on my own.”

“You’re extra something.”

He thinks it must be why he’s doing so badly now, only twenty and barely scraping by. It’s because he refuses help from his friends. It’s proof that he’s been right all along, he can’t do anything alone, he’ll just bury himself or fail.

Somehow he sleeps well after three movies and a breakdown. It might be something to do with the eight hour, barely controlled panic attack. He’s wasted a year’s worth of energy. He wakes up to his alarm and lies in bed for awhile, trying to figure out if he feels any different now. Now that he’s kissed Kyungsoo and made a decision about his future. His limbs feel the same, pins and needles just barely under the skin, cold fingers and warm palms. His head feels different, clear like the air early in the morning, before it’s fully light. Maybe it really is that easy. Just kiss a boy and take a break from study. Maybe he’ll stop feeling like he’s failing if he just  _ stops _ .

His monday classes are late so he’s had something close to a proper amount of sleep. Jongdae and Chanyeol are in the kitchen and they look at him like he’s come back from the dead or like he was the guy who got too drunk the night before and did something awful or embarrassing. A weird mix of apprehension and worry and amusement. Baekhyun knows it’s mostly love though.

“Stop that,” he says, “no one died.”

“You cried though,” Chanyeol points out, “which hasn’t happened in awhile.”

“Just because it’s not you crying for once,” he rolls his eyes and sits down with them, steals the bowl of leftovers Chanyeol’s eating.

“You do cry a lot,” says Jongdae, before adding, “babe,” almost as an afterthought. His smile is wicked.

“Yeah, because I’m always hanging out with you,” mutters Chanyeol, reaching across the table to grab his bowl back, changing his mind, leaving it to Baekhyun after all. Jongdae’s smile has turned soft. Baekhyun thinks of Kyungsoo.

In his room, after eating, Baekhyun turns on his phone. He peels the screen protector back at one corner, while it starts up, and then presses it back down. A bubble forms, like a tide coming in, a lighter patch of grey. He sits on his bed, shuffling back until his back is against the wall. His sheets are already cold and he slides his hands under them. He has a text. He sits up a little straighter.

**(07:13) Call me when you feel better**

**(07:15) If you want to**

He hits the call button immediately and then he hangs up and then he calls again. He shuts his eyes as it dials.

“I’m sorry,” says Kyungsoo, instead of a greeting, and Baekhyun kind of wants to hang up immediately. He takes a breath, chews at his teeth.

“No,” he says, “you were being lovely, you don't need to say that.”

“But I should have asked you.”

“There was nothing to ask, you just told me about a job. I'm sorry for worrying you, for being... like this.”

“Can I see you today?” The questions leaves Baekhyun a little breathless. He plucks at his bedspread, curls his foot up under him, pinches at the thin skin at his ankle, stretching it a little and then patting it smooth. He wants to go to Kyungsoo’s now, skip class, skip everything. They can run away to Busan together, go to the beach.

“After class,” he says, before he can promise something silly.

"You're going?”

“I have to.”

“Come to my place after, you can sleep.”

“Thank you.” There is a silence and Baekhyun thinks that he doesn’t want to hang up yet, he wants to say something big and bright, because he doesn’t feel like he’s those things but Kyungsoo makes him feel like he could be. “Kyungsoo,” he says, “you... you’re... I really like you.” His tongue feels swollen and the words come out clumsy and warped and he’s a baby, a tiny, tiny baby, but he doesn’t care. His cheeks burn but he doesn’t care.

“I really like you too,” says Kyungsoo, laughter in his voice. 

“I'm really glad Chanyeol broke your door.”

“Me too.”

Classes go strangely well. Baekhyun feels like there’s space around him, breathing room, and it doesn't suffocate him to say what he wants. He argues with one of his tutors and it's the sort of argument that leaves them both smiling at the end, like something important has come of it. Baekhyun isn't sure about that but it feels good. He doesn't leave with his jaw tight and his eyes itchy anyway.

At lunch he buys kimbap and strawberry milk, the same carton with the cute strawberry girl that he bought before. He isn't good without people but it feels alright, eating alone. He feels the same way as after a day at the beach, dried out and tired but warm too. He should get an ice cream on a cone. Instead, he sits in the sun, outside the library, and he takes a selfie with the pink carton and sends it to Kyungsoo.

**(13:27) A strawberry boy and a strawberry girl**

**(13:27) You're cute**

(13:28) your turn now

There is a pause between messages but then he gets one back, Kyungsoo with half a smile, the self-conscious kind that comes with being unused to taking selfies, his eyes serious behind his glasses. It looks like he’s in a lecture, there are rows of seats behind him, and that makes Baekhyun laugh. He must be a bad influence. He changes Kyungsoo’s contact image to the selfie and it feels satisfying, somehow, like proof he really does exist. He’s not some panic-driven hallucination after all but a real person that he's actually kissed. Someone he’ll see again

(13:34) pay attention in class

(13:34) im supposed to be the delinquent not you

(13:35) you’re really

(13:35) you look really good

(13:35) now focus

**(13:36) You're distracting**

(13:36) you're easily distracted

**(13:36) I'm focussing now**

**(13:36) See you later**

**(13:37)** **♡**

His afternoon classes are harder. He wants to see Kyungsoo. He wants to talk to every one of his lecturers, over explain what is happening, he’s going to leave for a little while but it’s okay he’s just having a hard time looking after himself right now, he’s going to come back. He’ll finish their papers first, of course. He’ll work hard. He still wants to be a social worker. Instead, he stays mostly silent, concentrating on avoiding eye contact with the lecturer of the course with the test he blanked on and biting his tongue when the worst kid in his class says anything at all. It’s strange, it’s usually easier to think that it’s normal, the way he is, when he’s out of his room and the sun is bright, but in the afternoon, close enough to leaving that he can taste it, each minute is a thousand years.

He’s the first person to leave his last class, bolting before the lecturer has said his last word, pushing through the double doors and into the day time. He’ll buy chocolate first, of course, because it might make Kyungsoo smile. He hums under his breath as he walks, something sweet, and he taps his hands against his thighs. Kyungsoo is waiting for him, what an impossible thing.

In the elevator of Kyungsoo’s apartment block, he frowns at his reflection. He thinks he looks different than he did yesterday, but that might just be because he feels different. His hair is weird. He pats at his cheeks with his hands, frowns, his hands are  _ gigantic _ . Have they always been gigantic? He needs to study. No. He puts his hands in his pockets and lets out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding. He doesn’t need to do anything.

Kyungsoo opens the door when Baekhyun knocks and he’s in sweatpants and a hoodie and he reaches out, pulls Baekhyun inside by his hand, and Baekhyun laughs and lets him, braids their fingers together tighter. In Kyungsoo’s room they stop and Kyungsoo turns to him and he looks so worried that Baekhyun tries to smile wider, reaches between them to tug at the string of his hoodie.

“Have you had a nice day?” he asks, unable to think of anything else, too caught up in the warmth that’s rising through his chest, his throat. Kyungsoo is smiling and he’s so relieved it hurts. Kyungsoo is smiling and he is sure nothing bad can ever touch him.

“Yeah,” says Kyungsoo, closing the gap between them further, sliding his hand up Baekhyun's arm to his shoulder, his neck, soft and cool. “Did you?”

“Of course,” says Baekhyun, “I’m here.”

He falls into Kyungsoo then, lets himself take the last step between then at a trip, wraps his arms around Kyungsoo’s waist and presses his face against Kyungsoo’s neck, under the collar of the hoodie, fluffy fabric and warm skin. Kyungsoo’s arms come up around his neck, over his shoulders, and his throat hurts suddenly and his eyes burn suddenly and he holds Kyungsoo tighter to keep himself from crying. Not sad, just grateful that Kyungsoo is there at all. He isn’t good without people. Chanyeol says no one is.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles. Kyungsoo’s grip on him tightens.

“Me too,” he says, a voice that matches his warm body. “Sometimes I try to... fix things that don’t need fixing.”

“I do need fixing,” Baekhyun laughs, Kyungsoo pulls back a little, so he can see him. He is frowning. Baekhyun is always trying to smile. “But not by you. It’s going to be okay,” he insists, and Kyungsoo accepts it with a kiss, tender and sweet.

Kyungsoo takes him to the kitchen then, so he can help with dinner. He’s asked Chanyeol what Baekhyun likes to eat so he’s making kimchi spaghetti and Baekhyun gives Kyungsoo chocolate and pretends like it’s the same thing. He’ll get better at being thoughtful, he decides, he’ll bring Kyungsoo new mechanical pencils and write him little notes with hearts and figure out how to make a chocolate souffle. He’ll learn more about Kyungsoo so he can be the best at it. They are both new to each other.

They cook together and Baekhyun is definitely not a chef but Kyungsoo seems good enough for both of them. He moves around the kitchen quietly, knowing exactly what he’s looking for and where to find it, never doing anything that doesn't need to be done. When Baekhyun tries to cook he always ends up with too many ingredients or not enough or he burns something or undercooks it. Kyungsoo knows where every grain of rice is going to end before he measures it but that doesn't mean he won't give Baekhyun all the hardest tasks. Well. It's an easy recipe, but Baekhyun still complains.

“Is this enough?” he asks, frowning at pile of capsicum he’s chopped. Kyungsoo wrinkles his nose.

“A little more,” he says. Baekhyun chops another piece, adds it to the pile.

“Is this enough?” he asks again, teasingly, leaning heavily against the bench so he can look up at Kyungsoo through his eyelashes. Kyungsoo glances at the pile and then at Baekhyun.

“Whatever you think,” he says, so mildly Baekhyun has to laugh. Kyungsoo smiles, holds put a piece of kimchi with his chopsticks, smiles wider when Baekhyun does as he’s told and eats it.

They eat at the dinner table and Baekhyun kicks at Kyungsoo’s ankles even though they’re close enough that their elbows knock together. Baekhyun is often made uncomfortable by silence, but he doesn’t mind sitting with Kyungsoo without talking. If he was being particularly dramatic he might say that there were things between them louder than words, but he’s feeling quieter than that, so he doesn’t, he just thinks it and rolls his eyes.

Afterwards, they go back to Kyungsoo’s room, and Kyungsoo has something that needs drawing up so he spreads squared paper out across his desk and plots points and taps the end of a pencil against his lower lip. Baekhyun lies on his bed, sorts through references he’s collected for his next assignments, kicks his feet in the air, hums girl group songs, reads out the quotes he doesn’t understand until they make more sense to him.

Kyungsoo comes to join him after awhile and he puts away his laptop and sits with him at the edge of the bed. He knows they have to talk properly, not just fall into golden silence. He knows they have to make themselves steady or nothing will ever work. He takes a breath.

“I’m only here because my parents died,” he says, plucking at the duvet.

“What?” Kyungsoo turns to him, bumping their knees together.

“I got a scholarship because of it, my social worker helped me with school, I’m only here because of other people and I... I want to finish it on my own.”

“Everyone needs help sometimes,” says Kyungsoo gently, “it doesn't mean you're not doing it yourself.”

“I know I just... I’m going to take a semester off anyway, so I can't take that job.”

Kyungsoo doesn't say anything to that, just bridges the space between them, shuffles closer to him, rests his head on his shoulder. Baekhyun is tired. He feels like he’s been tired since he was a kid, never able to catch up on sleep, dreaming too vivid and boring for it to be restful. It’s a little less exhausting next to Kyungsoo. He feels like if he closed his eyes he might sleep cleanly, with Kyungsoo soft against his side.

“It should be easier,” says Kyungsoo then, sitting up, quiet and firm, his voice like his touch, not light or soft but like he’s making sure his fingerprints are whole on Baekhyun’s skin. “I want you to know that the fact that you do anything at all, sleeping the way you do and eating the way you do and thinking about yourself the way you do, the fact that you can even get one word on paper is... it would be impossible for me. I can’t function without eating every three hours and I call my mum once a week because I need her to tell me I’m doing the right thing and you’re here... you’re here killing yourself and you think it’s because you’re weak? Stupid? It doesn’t... it doesn’t make sense. How can you possibly succeed if you’re so convinced you don’t deserve it?”

It’s the longest Baekhyun’s ever heard him talk in one go and for a moment he’s kind of awestruck. His expression is calm but his hands are moving, smoothing out soft folds in his pants, fiddling with the strings of his hoodie. Baekhyun reaches out, takes his hand and stills it, and Kyungsoo looks at him, smiles wryly, matches his grip tightly.

“I’m just... I don’t think I’m suited to academia,” says Baekhyun, turning Kyungsoo’s hand over in his, dragging the index finger of his other hand across the bridge of his knuckles.

“Maybe not, but academia shouldn’t just be one way of teaching or learning. A university should make it easier for you, not harder.”

“But it won’t. I’ll still have to get this qualification if I want to work with kids and it’s going to be essays and exams that get me there, nothing practical, not yet.”

“How can you say that and still think it’s your fault you’re having so much trouble? It’s a place that’s built to fail people like you and the people you want to help,” Kyungsoo sighs, squeezes Baekhyun’s hand again, frustration in his palm.

“People like me,” Baekhyun laughs, “I’m a mess.”

“You’re not,” Kyungsoo tugs his hand into his lap, “you’re just sad, maybe.”

“I’m just scared,” he sighs. “Chanyeol says I’m hungover.”

“Probably,” he smiles, “you need to rest. I think stopping for awhile is a good idea.”

“I’m going to do it though,” says Baekhyun then, sitting up a little straighter, “I mean... I’m going to finish it, when I come back. It might take me ten years but I want... I want to work with kids. I’ll do it.”

“Yeah,” Kyungsoo shuffles a little closer, leans his head on Baekhyun’s shoulder again, “yeah, I think you will.”

Baekhyun stays at Kyungsoo’s that night. They don’t really talk about it, it just seems obvious that he won’t leave until the morning. He texts Chanyeol to tell him where he is and his response is a paragraph of lewd emoji so Baekhyun gives Kyungsoo his phone and he sends back a single skull and nothing else. He gives Baekhyun a giant t-shirt to sleep in even though he argues that it’s warm enough to sleep naked. He refuses to let Baekhyun use his toothbrush so he makes do with his finger and some toothpaste and Kyungsoo laughs at him and poor dental hygiene suddenly seems worth it.

A large part of him is terrified that he’s already made Kyungsoo into the person that will save him. That Kyungsoo will resent him in a week because he’ll expect too much and be too clingy, too helpless, too selfish. His assignments will seem impossible again. He’ll stop eating and sleeping and the post-its will creep up his walls. He’ll try to avoid that if he can. He’ll finish this semester and then he’ll take his first real breath in six years.

“I’m gonna save the world,” he tells Kyungsoo, lying in the dark, curled up against each other, thinking that maybe he means he’s going to save himself.

“Of course you are,” says Kyungsoo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took so long and i don't know, i don't think i'm super happy with it. it's a strange in-between chapter that needed to be written but i really.. fought it.. as much as i could. it's cheesy right? these kids are romantics, truly. also kinda ranty haha. anyway! um, one more chapter! sooner than this was because i have a lot of it written already. thank you, as always, for reading, i appreciate it so much and im sorry if i don't reply to your comment, it's not because i don't appreciate it hugely, it's more because i get nervous about it. i'll try harder! thank you! thank you!! thank you!!


	13. Chapter 13

There are two months until semester ends. Fifty seven days and four essays and three exams and then it will be summer and Baekhyun will stop. He can’t remember what it feels like, not having something expected of him. Not having something he expects of himself. He’s not sure what he’s going to do. Maybe he’ll stay up for days trying to catch up on all the things he’s not let himself have, music and games and people. Maybe he’ll sleep for days, dream for days, bite his tongue for days.

“Worrying about what you’re going to do when you don’t have anything to worry about is pointless,” says Kyungsoo, slapping him lightly on the wrist. “You’re going to eat with me and watch movies with me and-”

“Let’s talk about this later, come nap with me now.”

They’re studying together in Baekhyun’s room and he has post-its on each finger and Kyungsoo has pencil lead on the heel of his palm. Baekhyun feels like he’s balancing on a knife blade but with Kyungsoo there he’s steadier. There is no wind and he can keep his balance well. The bare walls of his room don't bother him.

Kyungsoo crosses the room to where Baekhyun is sitting on his bed, takes and holds his wrist to pluck the post-its from his fingers, one by one. His thumb presses against the inside of Baekhyun’s wrist. He puts the little bundle on the bedside table, squared neat, and falls back against the bed, pulling on Baekhyun’s hand so that he follows. Their shoulders knock together and Baekhyun turns to throw himself half across Kyungsoo's chest. Kyungsoo grunts, laughs a little breathlessly.

“You're heavy,” he grumbles, but he doesn't push him off.

“Full of brains,” says Baekhyun, smiling against Kyungsoo’s throat.

There is a lot he still has to do. Things that are easy, really, but feel hard. Withdrawing from his second semester papers only takes a few clicks, but it feels like more. It hollows him out and he can't tell if it’s a good thing. It's like ticking boxes or taking pebbles out of a bowl and he’ll either be a completed checklist or a piece of empty porcelain at the end. No, that's too dramatic, he’ll just be Byun Baekhyun: unenrolled. Byun Baekhyun: on hiatus.

He does it all properly, officially. He withdraws and he submits a deferral form and Chanyeol and Jongdae try to convince him that he should get a medical certificate too, but that’s not really something he’s comfortable with yet. He thinks about it all like it’s another kind of training. These are things he’ll need to know about when he’s a social worker. He’ll talk to kids who need to stop before they burn to ash and that's part of it, the talking, but he’ll also have to help them with everything official. Forms and emails. He starts a bookmarks folder, administration for future drop-outs.

There is one month until semester ends. Thirty three days and one essay and three exams. He calls his parents and it’s an easier conversation than he deserves. They’re disappointed, it’s clear, but they’re more worried. They want him to come home and he might, he doesn’t know yet. He misses them. He calls his brother too and Baekbeom is something else, something a little harsher, a little more skeptical. Baekhyun doesn’t hate him for it.

“I’m not like you,” he says, trying to laugh.

“I know you’re not,” says Baekbeom. “I hope you’ll go back.”

“I have to,” says Baekhyun, with certainty, “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“Of course you do,” Baekbeom sounds almost amused. “I still hope you’ll go back.”

Baekhyun studies every day but it isn’t like before. He doesn’t work until he burns, until his eyes spot grey and white and his eyelids scratch. He wakes up and goes to class and comes home and studies until twilight when he stops for dinner. Chanyeol cooks or helps Baekhyun to cook and they eat together at the table and Baekhyun doesn’t know why it’s so easy now, to let himself relax like this, but it is.

“In high school,” says Chanyeol, tapping his chopsticks against the side of his bowl, “do you know what you reminded me of?”

“Do I want to?”

“It’s not bad, it’s just... you know when you run too fast and can’t stop and you’re always like two seconds away from falling, but you never do, you’re just stuck feeling like you’re gonna fall?"

“I think that's just you,” says Baekhyun, and then he says, “is there a good way to take that?” He’s a little taken aback, really, but he still laughs. Then he puts his chopsticks down and sits on his hands so he can’t fidget. Next to him, Chanyeol sighs with his whole body.

“No, I just mean you never stopped, the whole of high school, and that’s probably because you needed to keep going then, but I don’t think you need to do that anymore. Sometimes the fall is better, I guess, than running forever like that.”

Baekhyun doesn’t say anything. He kicks at a table leg. His shoelaces are untied. It's still a fall, he thinks. Of course of course of course.

“You talk a lot of shit, Park Chanyeol,” he says, finally, and Chanyeol laughs.

“Yeah,” he grins, “come get bubble tea with me tomorrow?”

“You’re buying.”

There are two weeks until semester ends. Fifteen days and three exams and then it will be summer and Baekhyun will stop. He doesn't know how he feels about it yet, he's scared and relieved and so guilty sometimes he can hardly stomach it. He stays awake some nights, staring at the seams in the ceiling, the ripples in his curtains. He has finished all his essays and sometimes he doesn't know what to do with his hands except to turn pages.

But Kyungsoo is there through it all. They see each other almost every day, for studying and for kissing and for talking. Kyungsoo only has one exam and he’ll finish a week before Baekhyun does. Baekhyun helps him where he can. He isn’t loud at studying, he doesn’t need the sound or space that Baekhyun does, but he seems to like the company and Baekhyun is glad to give it. And when they fall out of studying into something else Baekhyun tells him about his plans for the future and all the ways they change.

“I'm going to join a circus,” he says, curled up with Kyungsoo on his couch “I'm going to be an idol.”

“We’ll have to stop kissing, if you're an idol,” says Kyungsoo, pressing his lips to Baekhyun’s ear, his hand under Baekhyun’s shirt, warm against his ribs. There is nothing left of the scratches from when he fell.

“No we won't,” he laughs, “you can be my secret.”

“Honestly, you're not worth the sasaengs,” his breath is wet and warm.

“Of course I am,” Baekhyun pouts, “I bring you chocolate every day and even let you eat most of it.”

“That’s true,” Kyungsoo murmurs, sitting up, swinging one leg across Baekhyun’s lap, so he’s straddling his hips, “that might be enough.”

“I can do more,” breathes Baekhyun, pressing up against him.

“Gross,” says Jongin, startling them both, “this is a communal area.”

Baekhyun laughs, covering his blush with his hands. Kyungsoo hides his face in Baekhyun’s neck for a moment, just a moment, and then gets up off him. They should be studying. Baekhyun’s first exam is in a couple of days and Kyungsoo’s is at the end of the week. He shouldn’t even be here. He should be at home, sticking post-its to his walls, instead of underneath a boy with his hand against his skin and his thighs...

“I need to study,” he stands up, shakes out his limbs. Kyungsoo is watching him, lower lip pushed out thoughtfully, a blush fading from his cheeks.

“Help me cook,” he says, decisively, “and then we can study.”

“Feed me too,” says Jongin, from the kitchen, “to apologise for traumatising me.”

“Maybe,” says Kyungsoo.

Baekhyun lets out a shaky breath and gathers up all the threads of his worry and then let's them go too. He follows Kyungsoo into the kitchen, takes the things that are passed to him, the rice and the vegetables and the small packets of spice. They do this a lot, work on small things to distract him from bigger things, to set him back to feeling steady. Baekhyun thinks he can’t possibly deserve it and then he thinks Kyungsoo deserves everything and then he thinks that soon he’ll have time to give him all he can. Two weeks, fifteen days, three exams. It’s not that much, really.

On the day of Kyungsoo’s only exam, it’s hot and raining. He’s more frazzled than Baekhyun has ever seen him, straightening his clothes and smoothing down his hair and staring at his notes with a kind of desperate intensity, like he could set them on fire with just a look. Baekhyun goes to his desk, starts sorting through the stationary scattered across it.

“What do you need for your exam?” he asks, picking up a pencil case.

“What?”

“What stationery do you need?”

Kyungsoo stares at him for a long moment then shakes his head, like he’s clearing it. “Three pencils,” he says, “mechanical pencils, the grey ones, and the black calculator.”

“There’s a blue calcu-”

“ _No_ , it has to be the black one, we have to use a certain kind, it can’t be anything else.”

“Alright,” Baekhyun puts the calculator down, rifles around in Kyungsoo’s top drawer until he finds the right one. “Is that all?”

“A... a pen, blue ink.” .

“Easy,” Baekhyun smiles, fills the pencil case and sits it on top of the calculator. Kyungsoo is still frowning so he takes the two steps between them to drape his arms over Kyungsoo’s shoulders. “Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re fighting.”

“This is how I always look,” says Kyungsoo, face clearing a little, almost a smile. “I’m tired.”

“Did you eat this morning?”

“I’m not like you.”

“Lucky,” Baekhyun grins and swoops in to kiss him. Kyungsoo wrinkles his nose, licks his lower lip. Baekhyun lets go of him, steps back. “You’re gonna get better than an A+.”

“Thank you.”

“Remember me when you’re building skyscrapers.”

“But you’ll be there.”

Baekhyun tries to laugh, to cover his embarrassment, and Kyungsoo smiles at him, soft and still. They haven’t known each other for long, a few months, one semester, but it feels like longer. It’s a thought that makes Baekhyun cringe a little bit, because it’s so... open, and earnest. The sort of thing teenagers think about one another, a week after they’ve met, that they’re sure they’ll never love anyone else. Well. Baekhyun and Kyungsoo aren’t much older than that. It’s not his fault Kyungsoo is wonderful.

Kyungsoo goes to his exam and Baekhyun stays at his apartment, studies in his bed, surrounded by that soft light that he had thought would never fit him. What a silly thing, certainty of feeling. He decides he’ll tell Kyungsoo that he doesn’t believe in being sure about anything but he’s kind of sure he loves him. Maybe. A little bit. He bites the pillow, kicks his legs, turns back to his textbooks.

It’s hot on the day of his last exam, twelve days later. Baekhyun’s palms are itchy with sweat and his t-shirt isn’t thin enough even though it’s the kind of t-shirt that’s been washed so many time it’s almost see-through. He’s had two exams already and he doesn't know how either of them went, not really. He thinks he might have passed but he’s also sure he failed. At least he knows he wrote something this time, he handed in a little more than a blank piece of paper with his name attached.

Waiting for an exam to start is always strange. There are students clutching handfuls of paper, last minute notes they read frantically, leaning up against the wall, worrying at their lips with their teeth. There are students with clear pencil cases, one pencil, one pen, an eraser, a sharpener, their expressions carefully blank, like they think someone might be able to take their answers if they smile or frown. There are students sitting on the floor cross-legged, curled over their hands. Baekhyun is different again. He hops from foot to foot, runs his hands through his hair, goes through his notes in his head, punctuating every word with a sound, so song lyrics can't creep in where they’re not wanted. His pencil lead will break. His pen will leak blotchy ink that gets on the heel of his palm or the the curl of his pinky finger and will then be transferred messily into the paper. He’ll write without thinking and have to cross out whole sentences. It will be fine and he will be fine and then he will be finished.

He doesn’t have an answer yet, to what he’ll do afterwards. Maybe he’ll do his military service. Maybe he’ll move back to Busan. Maybe he’ll get a job selling fruit or singing for commercials and decide that it’s his calling and forget about university altogether. Everyone in the exam room with him will be a social worker before he will. No. It doesn’t matter. Social work still feels right to him, like breathing feels right to him, like sleeping and eating and laughing feel right to him. Like Kyungsoo feels right to him. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It doesn’t matter what happens next. He’ll be okay.

They’re let into the exam room and it’s cooler in there, properly air conditioned, and Baekhyun takes a seat near the front so he doesn’t have to squint to see the time. It’s a bad habit, watching the clock in exams, but Baekhyun can’t  seem to break it. He puts his pen and pencil at the top of the desk, parallel to the top edge of the exam paper and then he picks up his pen and fills out the title page. His head is full of all the leftovers from his already completed exams and he thinks it’s going to be difficult to sort through it, but he isn’t stupid. He’ll know what to do when he sees the questions. He’s prepared for this. The exam monitor walks to the front of the room, announces the start of the test, and Baekhyun turns the first page.

(17:03) im finished!!!!!!!!!!

(17:04) i think i got 100%

(17:04) 101%

**(17:05) 102%**

(17:05) don't be ridiculous

**(17:05) How far away are you?**

**(17:06) Chanyeol got you a cake**

**(17:07) It says “Congrats on dropping out”**

**(17:07) I’ve locked him in the bathroom**

(17:08) my hero

(17:08) im 10 minutes away

(17:09) 9

(17:10) 8

(17:12) 6

(17:13) 10 again i gotta get snacks

**(17:14) You know I'm cooking right?**

(17:14) those things aren't related

**(17:14) Bring chocolate**

(17:15) um im not stupid

(17:15) wtf you really think im an idiot

(17:15) 102% kyungsoo

(17:15) that's better than an a+

(17:15) you like white chocolate right?

**(17:16) I love you**

(17:18) ew gross

(17:18) i love you too

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this is done, i guess. it's really been a thing! thank you so much to everyone who has read it. i really appreciate all the lovely things you've said and idk. all of you are wonderful. and to everyone who relates to baekhyun in some way, i hope you are okay, i hope you can figure yourself out. it's a hard thing to do and kind of a bullshit institution, academia i mean, but it's kind of necessary sometimes. idk. it can be wonderful. anyway good luck to you all and i believe in you!! 100%!! thank you thank you thank you.

**Author's Note:**

> ah so yeah this is gonna be a.. thing. maybe kinda long i haven't figured it all out yet. sorry for the title i really can't be bothered with them tbh they're the hardest bit of writing. uuummm im on tumblr @tabeorin if you wanna say hello :) im a real exo baby so it would be really nice. lemme know if you like this thing haha im v nervous. thank you for reading !!!


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